Learning the lessons of defeat

On the 120th anniversary of the outbreak of the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), China should reflect on the causes for its defeat

This year marks the 120th anniversary of the outbreak of the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-95). As China gears up for the anniversary, it is essential and actually more realistic for the country to reflect upon and draw a lesson from the defeat of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), than to expect a former invader to express regret over what it has been trying hard to glorify.

Japan's victory in the First Sino-Japanese War was built on its successful institutional reform. The Opium Wars, two wars fought between Western powers and the Qing Dynasty from 1839 to 1860, were a cautionary tale for China and Japan, prompting the two neighbors to embark on learning from the West, although in a different way. Japan was determined to adapt itself to Western learning from the inside out during the Meiji Restoration, a period spanning the 1860s to the early 1910s that was responsible for Japan's emergence as a modernized nation.

The Qing Dynasty, however, kept the learning superficial. The reason behind the Qing court's reluctance to fully adopt Western knowledge and technologies was, for the large part, bureaucratic. Take the Beiyang Fleet for example. As a product of the Qing Dynasty's Self-Strengthening Movement from the 1860s to the 1890s after the Opium Wars, the Beiyang Fleet emerged as a dominant navy in East Asia and a match for Japan's maritime force before the onset of the First Sino-Japanese War. The fleet garnered greater resources than others mostly because of its patron Li Hongzhang. But Li as an influential vassal with Han Chinese origins had many rivals, especially the bigwigs of Manchu origin. His opponent and imperial tutor Weng Tonghe, for instance, occupied several important posts in the Qing administration and used his influence to cut and even suspend naval expenditure in peacetime.

In the eyes of Li's political enemies the fleet was Li's private asset, and it should be weakened to prevent Li from becoming more powerful. In the words of Liang Qichao, a leading reformist who lived during the late Qing Dynasty, Li was a hero revealed by hard times. but he was not one capable of confronting the entire elite group and turning the tide relying on his own strength.

After three decades of the movement, the Qing court failed in its military reform due to bureaucratic division and factionalism, despite the establishment of a well-equipped maritime force and army. Many fine soldiers fought their best, especially those from the Beiyang Fleet, but this did not alter the result of the war. The more courage they demonstrated, the less competent the Qing court appeared to be. Yet the defeat of the Qing court was more than a result of reform failure.

When the relatively small island state of Japan waged war against the Qing Dynasty, it was gambling its fate. It intended to permanently occupy China and so studied and copied the Qing Dynasty's experience of shattering people's will and faith when overthrowing the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). This tactic was further employed in its war of aggression against China in the 20th century, during which the Japanese military committed appalling atrocities across China, including the Nanjing Massacre, which, to a certain extent, was a copycat crime of the 10-day mass killings of residents in Yangzhou by the Qing troops as a punishment and warning after they conquered the city from forces loyal to the former regime.

People's faith, nevertheless, could not be destroyed overnight. The Chinese nation used to have a strong character with aspiration and innovation, at least during the Spring and Autumn Period (770-476 BC), a period that encouraged diverse thinking and during which people held dear to the Confucian principles of xin, yi and ren, meaning integrity, righteousness and benevolence. While with the establishment of the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BC), the first unified and centralized power structure in Chinese history, autocratic monarchy began to flourish with the promotion of enslaving education, which started with the burning of books and burying of dissenting scholars. With the pillar of faith eroded throughout the imperial past, the Chinese nation fell into a state of disunity, which opened door to foreign intrusion. Mass killings were simply employed by the Japanese invaders as a convenient means of punishing and warning against resistance.

Despite all that, the defeat of the Qing court in the First Sino-Japanese War had far-reaching effects on the Chinese nation. To be precise, it was the First Sino-Japanese War, not the Opium Wars, which marked the awakening and rebirth of the Chinese nation. It was also a direct cause of the 1911 revolution, which brought down the feudal autocratic monarchy with a history of more than 2,000 years.

While for Japan, it had its first taste of gambling success, which took the island kingdom further down the road of militarism. Depending on its risk-taking spirit and surprise attacks, Japan later attained victory over the Russian forces in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), but the sneak attack on the Pearl Harbor proved to be an enormous failure. Just as South Korean critic Lee O-young pointed out, Japan's idea of sneak attacks was inspired by the stealth kills in Japanese Kendo and Sumo. However, the battlefield of the Pacific War was a much larger arena, where Japan was doomed to stumble in its attempt to duplicate a bonsai success.

The Chinese version of the article was carried in Reference News.