4 - Two Wars and First Successes: From the Port Arthur Massacre to the Treaty of Portsmouth

Summary

In July 1894, tensions between the Qing dynasty and Japan over the status of Korea erupted into war. One week after the Japanese forces took the city of Port Arthur in late November 1894, a journalist for the French newspaper Le Petit Journal gave his comment on the siege of the city. He had not much sympathy left for the Chinese defeat:

[The news of Port Arthur had] brought our [France’s] joy to its pinnacle. Trained and armed in the European way, Japan is currently administrating a serious beating to the Chinese. Nothing better, and our dead from Tonkin will be avenged. I say: Will be, because I hope that it is not yet over; I even hope that the skinning of the great mastodon has yet just begun.

The occupation of the main parts of China, he continued, will make civilisation in Asia do a leap forward of three centuries and it was quite the spectacle to see ‘the beneficial invasion of the backwards and barbaric Orient by the progressive and modern Orient’.3 Before the war, China, ‘that amorphous monster, terrible as much as abject, the shame of humanity’, was thought to be invincible. But the Japanese had shown ‘that there was nothing in China. No authority, no intelligence, no military capacity’. The French opinion, according to the journalist, could be resumed as follows:

Go ahead, Japan! And no things by halves! The war until the end, until the final extermination, the sustainable material occupation, and foremost until the formal opening of China to European civilisation, willingly or not!

This article from Le Petit Journal is visibly tainted by resentment towards China: one decade prior to its publication, the French and Chinese armies had been clashing in French Indochina. Nevertheless, bitterness aside, the palpable sympathy towards Japan was not restricted to the French journalist, as Western public opinion often sided with the Japanese during the war.

There were several reasons for this tendency. The United States, for example, believed that a Japanese victory would lead to the advancement of progress and civilisation in Asia. It also believed that Korea would remain independent. The Americans also seemed to feel sympathetic towards what they saw as an underdog taking on a much bigger enemy.