ABSTRACT
In 1880 one of Japan’s senior military officers, if not the most important one, Yamagata Aritomo, called attention to the danger that the modernisation of the Chinese army and navy posed to Japan’s safety. At the same time, the fortifications built to defend Japan’s coast were not only intended as a deterrent against a Russian attack from the sea, but also against a Chinese invasion, should Japan and China become involved in a military conflict over Korea (Drea 2009: 52, 55). The might of China, which as Norman (1884: 259, 287-8) wrote, had ‘made great strides’ since 1860 ‘in what we call Western civilisation’, was also still a factor taken into account by politicians and diplomats in France and Great Britain. In 1883 the French ambassador in Beijing warned his government that the Chinese soldiers were well-trained, well-armed and had foreign officers (who in the eyes of Western observers made the difference) (ibid.: 107, 262). The performance of Chinese soldiers in the Sino-French War of 1884-85 impressed the British and, some ten years later, the then British Secretary for India, Lord Kimberley, mentioned their ‘serious power of annoyance’ as an argument not to provoke China too much in the Burmese-Chinese frontier negotiations that were being conducted. 1 The Chinese fleet had German- and British-built state-of-the art warships, and the Chinese army and navy used European armaments manufactured by Krupp, Mauser, Armstrong and other companies; a reality that in 1900, at the time of the Boxer Rebellion, made the military operations to relieve the besieged legations in Beijing far from easy for the powers. China also produced such weaponry, with varying success, in local arms factories.
