Introduction
In the mid-nineteenth century, China and Japan both faced the rising threat of Western
imperialism. Yet, despite the historic cultural ties between the Middle Kingdom and Japan, their
responses to the same external threat were quite different. For China, long the dominant power in
East Asia, the expansion of Western commercial interests coincided with a long period of
dynastic decline. When confronted with the dual problems of growing rebellions against Manchu
rule at home and British demands for trade concessions in the 1830s, the Qing dynasty proved
unable to mobilize the resources necessary to defend the empire. The first and second Opium
Wars revealed disparities in military technology between China and the European great powers.
Faced internal unrest and the prospect of China's dismemberment, numerous Han Chinese
provincial leaders made an attempt at internal reform, the so-called Tongzi Restoration (1862-74),
aimed at reforming the military, creating an arms industry, and strengthening traditional
Confucian government. While these and later reforms had the effect of prolonging the Qing
dynasty until 1911, they were insufficient to halt China's relative decline vis-à-vis the European
great powers and Japan.
News of China's defeat in the Opium Wars, carried by Dutch and Chinese ships to the
magistrate of Nagasaki and then relayed to the shogun at Edo (Tokyo), caused profound shock
among the Japanese feudal elite. The arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry and his "black ships"
in Edo Bay in July 1853 ended Japan's two centuries of self-imposed isolation. The Tokugawa
shogunate's inability to defend the country led to its overthrow by a group of reform-mined
samurai from Satsuma and Chōshū, who acted to "restore" the sixteen year-old Emperor Meiji.
The new leadership then spent the next twenty years consciously and methodically emulating the
military, political, technological, and economic practices of the leading great powers of the time.
In particular, they built a mass army, a general staff system, a centralized state bureaucracy
modeled on those of Germany, and a navy modeled on that of Great Britain. Within thirty years
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Convention