ABSTRACT
The Western concept of civilisation was introduced into Japan and China in the middle of the nineteenth century. Although intellectuals in the late Qing Dynasty came into contact with the word “civilisation” earlier than their Japanese contemporaries, Fukuzawa Yukichi may have been the first to translate the word “civilisation” into the Chinese “wenming.” From the perspective of global history, the chapter discusses the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 in its broader international context, and it reflects on the ways in which the discourse of “civilisation” contributed to the discursive violence under Western hegemony in the second half of the nineteenth century. On 21 November 1894, the Second Corps of the Japanese army occupied Port Arthur, and up to 20,000 civilians were massacred over the following four days. James Creelman’s report “The Massacre at Port Arthur,” appearing in The World on 20 December 1894, was the most influential of all the news articles about the Port Arthur Massacre.
