JAPAN’S OCCUPATION OF TAIWAN, 1895-1945

Although the Chinese government had had reluctantly agreed to transfer the island to Japan, people living on Taiwan had their own agenda. On May 23, Taiwan declared itself a republic and set up an independent government. With that government came an army and a mobilization to resist occupation by the Japanese. The founders of the 1895 Taiwanese “republic” shrewdly took Western political labels and applied them to ad hoc institutions, unsuccessfully attempting to obtain French support against the Japanese occupation.²⁰ It took the Japanese military five months to pacify the island, and for four more years the Taiwanese mounted an insurgency campaign that wore on the Japanese.²¹ As one Japanese baron put it: “Japan had made no preparations whatever for the administration of the island at the time of its acquisition.”²²

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THE END OF THE WAR AND THE TREATY OF SHIMONOSEKI

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.
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