The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895: Perceptions, Power, and Primacy (review)

In a closely argued, thoroughly researched, and well-sourced narrative, S. C. M. Paine captures the chaotic miscalculations, strategic stretches, fortunate escapes, and the extraordinary political impact of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95. The struggle between newly emergent Meiji Japan and the dying Qing Empire of China, quite accurately characterized by Stewart Lone as "Japan's First Modern War," in his 1994 study of the conflict, has long been in need of an international history that examines both sides of the war and investigates the war's impact on international relations in the Far East. This Paine provides in almost all particulars.

Tracing the origins and course of the war through the capitals of East Asia, and the corridors of power in Western states as well, Paine examines events on the battlefields of Korea and China, and the naval engagements off their shores equally well. She shows the impact of the war's course on the negotiators and bystanders in the fin-de-siècle international arena by peeling away the cover stories and peering into the peace negotiations that ended the war. The agency of the Chinese and Japanese negotiators is clear, but so, too, is the opportunism of the Great Powers in the wake of the Treaty of Shimonoseki. The book confronts directly such painful and topical subjects as the Japanese occupation of Port Arthur in 1894, where, in full view of the world's press and military observers, an orgy of "reprisals" on the Chinese residents of that hard-scrabble frontier port occurred that some now mention in the same breath as the "rape of Nanking" in a later war. Paine shows how observers reported atrocities in China and cites Western apologists for Japan's actions in the atmosphere of customary imperialist practices.

In light of Paine's early statement that while the war may be practically ignored in Western literature, "not so in the East," and her reference in the fine bibliographical essay to the extensive archival and secondary literature available on the war in Chinese and Japanese, a more complete bibliography of Asian language materials available would have been welcome. Yet, because Paine's formidable research seems to have exhausted the Western language materials on a conflict between Asian nations that attracted close examination from international military analysts, this will matter little to most readers. She shows such skill in bringing their voices into the narrative, that many may find the range of Western views as interesting as their observations.

The concluding section of the book on the cultural dimensions of the war also takes a multi-faceted approach to true international history. There, Paine masterfully examines the ways the war reflected and refracted Japanese, Chinese, and "Western" cultural values developed over centuries, that were to influence future events as well. Her comment that the Chinese "common soldiers had little incentive to fight" (p. 362)—followed by breezy references from numerous Western observers on the topic—is just one of the points where Paine directs a beacon at areas in need of historical illumination by future scholars as strong as the night-piercing searchlights of modernity so favored in Japanese woodblock prints of the war.

In responding to Marius B. Jansen's call (p. 371) for a thorough historical treatment of one of the yawning gaps in East Asian history, Paine's history of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 succeeds admirably. It is essential reading for the student of war.