Russian Policy toward Korea before and during the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95

Russian Policy toward Korea before and during the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 M. N. PAK WITH WAYNE PATTERSON Jßeginning in the late 1860s, feudal Korea entered into a period of cataclysmic events resulting from attempts by capitalist powers to gain a market for their commodities, the ending of Korea's isolation under the pressure of unequal treaties concluded with Japan, the United States, Great Britain, Germany, tsarist Russia, and France, and from contradictions and struggles between these foreign powers for political and economic influence.1 This struggle among foreign powers for a predominant position in Korea led to the Sino-Japanese War of 1894—95, a turning point in the development of international relations in East Asia. It was also representative of the colonial policy of world capitalism in its attempt to partition and repartition the world for benefit of the great imperialist powers and their capitalist monopolies. Thus the Sino-Japanese War opened the way to the territorial partition of China and neighboring countries by the imperialist powers, and Korea was one of the first victims of this predatory policy. This is a revised version of a paper prepared for delivery on the panel "Big Power Diplomacy in Late Yi Korea" at the 32nd annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Washington, D.C., March 21-23, 1980. 1 . A general review of the events ofthis period can be found in Kukchu Sin, Kündae Chosön oegyo sa [Diplomatic history of modern Korea](Seoul: T'amgudang, 1965). 109 110Journal of Korean Studies Despite the affirmation of Korean independence in the Treaty of Shimonoseki, Korea nearly suffered a complete loss of sovereignty . However, Japanese attempts to establish total domination in Korea after the war met not only with national resistance by antiJapanese patriotic forces in Korea, including the ruling monarch, but also with Russia's policy of preserving neighboring Korea as an independent state. An objective historical study of Russo-Korean relations has been prevented, to a great extent, by the myth of the "Russian threat," invented by such masters of political provocation as Lord Curzon. Created in the nineteenth century and widely spread by the English and Japanese press, it was a pretext for Great Britain and Japan to carry out their aggressive policy in East Asia. Shortly before the Second World War, Japanese historians and diplomats made efforts tojustify, under the pretext of "defending national security" against the threat of "Russian expansion," the colonial enslavement ofKorea and its transformation into a military base for an aggressive war against neighboring countries.2 The influence of the myth of the Russian threat to Asia can also be found in contemporary literature regarding the international situation of Korea and other East Asian nations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Possibly with the intent to rehabilitate Japan's former aggressive policy, Morinosuke Kajima, a contemporary Japanese historian, has referred again to the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95. Lamenting that after the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, "a sudden and cruel turn of events—in the form of the so-called 'Triple Intervention'—threatened to deprive Japan of the fruits of its hard-won victory," Kajima suggests that this "unexpected intervention and the events that followed" was "one of the most agonizing chapters inJapan's diplomatic history."3 It is obvious that Kajima sees his own mission to be the formulation of lessons from this diplomatic defeat ofJapan, emphasizing the mistakes and miscalculations that led to the Triple Intervention.4 The thesis of the Russian threat and the particular aggressiveness of tsarist Russia toward Korea and other Asian countries has 2.Tatsuji Takeuchi, War and Diplomacy in theJapanese Empire (New York: Doubleday , Doran, 1935); Kengi Hamada, Prince Ito (Tokyo: Sanseido, 1936); Kikujirö Ishii, Diplomaticheskie kommentarii [Diplomatic commentaries], trans, and ed. by Aleksandr Antonovich Troianovskii from the English translation of the original Gaikö yoroku (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1942). 3.Morinosuke Kajima, TheEmergence ofJapan as a WorldPower, 1895—1925 (Tokyo, 1968), p. 15. 4.Ibid., pp. 35-36. Pak: Russian Policy toward Korea111 found its way into the historiography ofJapan and Western countries to justify the aggressive actions of other powers under the pretext of defending the independence of...