ABSTRACT
The arrival of British and American gunboats in East Asian waters around the midnineteenth century meant that Western imperialism was about to engulf the world’s last frontier: the Far East. The recognition of Western technological and military supremacy provoked shocked responses that would become the defining theme of modern East Asia. In China, the Self-strengthening movement started in the 1860s and in Japan, the Meiji-Restoration took place in 1868. Within three decades of these initial responses, China and Japan were at war with each other, not with the Western imperialists. The Sino-Japanese naval war in 1894-5 was the test of these East Asian responses to the Western challenge. China’s defeat by Japan was to fundamentally alter the East Asian power structure which had been dominated by China for centuries.
