ABSTRACT
Since the twenty-first century began, the world has been witnessing increasing complexity in international relations. It seems in this new age of ‘globalization’ that the nationstate will no longer be as important as it was in the preceding century. One wonders how historians of the next century will assess and judge today's international politics. Similarly it is of considerable interest to re-examine international relations of the early twentieth century, where we find a very different world. It was both the high age of nationalism and the nation-state and the beginning of a new era in which the whole world was being drowned in a nation-based international system. As we have just recently celebrated the centenary of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, it is very opportune to look at how the impact of the West shaped Japan and China and their relations with each other.
