alternatehistory.com

Charlie MacDonald, Strange States, Weird Wars, and Bizzare Borders (weirdworld.postr.com, 2014)

You know what, screw this.

Since more and more of my recent posts have been about wars, I think it’s time I made the topic addition officially… well, official. Also, I’m finding out that some of our weird, modern nations were kinda born from some pretty interesting and bizarre conflicts in of themselves.

However, I am not going to be some squinty-eyed historian who will prattle on about so-and-so person on that so-and-so date for that so-and so battle. Details? No thank you.

So, got that? Title change, extra focus, expansion official, and now back to our usual bickering.

In this case, let’s focus on East Asia after the Sino-French War. The end of the conflict was, in a nutshell, the end for Empress Dowager Cixi. It blew apart the Qing Dynasty’s prestige in Indochina and shattered the confidence of the puffed-up traditionalists at court, all of whom quickly pointed at each other to explain the defeat. Not only had Peking lost her influence in the south, it also had to cede the Pescadores Islands aka. the stepping stones to Taiwan*, opening the island province to future foreign meddling. Also, before we go further: Yes, Taiwan. I refuse to call it Formosa like what some people in Europe or the Americas does. Even the Japanese call it Taiwan, so I’m going to. Bite me.

For the traditionalists, too bad for them, and too bad for Cixi. It didn’t matter that she herself supported modernising the army and navy, or that she navigated as best she could amongst the Forbidden City’s deadly decadent court. To most officials, she was the very symbol of a government that, “didn’t go far enough” to win the war. The fact that, since Emperor Tongzhi’s death, she was also the spider behind his heir's regency and a traditionalist on other issues didn’t help matters. After a nasty bout of court politics too long to talk about, Cixi and her cohorts ended up being outmanoeuvred by the reformists, whom were headed by Empress-Mother Alute and her young son, Prince Alin [1] . The Empress Dowager would later get herself kicked out of Peking, eventually spending the rest of her days at faraway Xi’an.




With that, the reformists quickly went to work, though they soon found themselves drowning in their difficulties of modernizing China. To put it simply: there was a lot of problems. Infrastructure? Haphazard. Taxation? Unequal. Starvation? Still a concern. The law system? Plagued with corruption. See also: radical secret societies, anti-Manchu movements, and widespread anti-Christian sentiment. And corruption. Massive, massive corruption

And the biggest mess of all was the state of the armed forces. After their battles with the French, the imperial court wanted a unified army and navy. Trouble is, Qing China never had a unified army or navy. Almost all their armed and naval forces were independently based on their respective home regions and they were ridden full with, again, corruption and mismanagement. Ammunition was sold for cash, sailors gambled on machine parts, and regional commanders were almost free to do what they want in their spare time. The extra fact that, during the Sino-French War, the court sought the help of the Black Flags, a literal bandit force and protection racket [2], was an embarrassing sore to Empress Alute.

All of that had got to go.

By 1890, Peking had installed a roundtable of generals and harangued every leading commander to meet up yearly to discuss military logistics. More men were promoted through merit, not by wealth or family lines. The judicial system was reworked, and corruption in the armed forces was searched and expunged like weeds in a racehorse course. New gunnery was bought from the West, and more military advisors were hired to instruct the Qing on modern warfare.

But it was also around this time that things began to change. Qing court politics are more complex and vindictive than I can understand, but from that year onwards, the imperial court prioritised the land armies more than the naval fleets. In a weird way, it did made some sort of sense: China was a land power, and control over the vast expanses was seen as the utmost of importance to the dynasty. Plus, a tamed army could help wonders against any bandit force or smuggling concerns. Conversely, there was little at sea to reason for large investments to the navy, apart from Taiwan. True, the Great Powers had more than enough ships to blast the coastline to the stratosphere, but they still need to fight the armies in the end.

Now this wasn't to say that the separate navies were entirely neglected. Modern cruisers were still commissioned and a Navy Yamen was established in 1892 to provide a unified command for the various armadas. But on the whole, a lot of attention went more towards stitching the various armies together and improving the communications between them.




And it all went… mixedly. And yes, I think that term should be in the English language.

Imagine a meeting between your uncles, if all your uncles are part of the Camorra. The commanders and generals of the Qing were kinda like that. They didn’t like to lose their independence, nor the weeding of some of their shady pastimes, and a few had egos that could rival Kaiser Wilhelm II. So when everyone was forced to actually discuss logistics together as a group at the roundtables, things went south pretty fast. So perhaps that explained why things went the way they did during the Sino-Japanese War of 1895.

And to talk about that we need to talk about Korea. A lot happened in the build-up to 1895, but it can all be rounded up with the Peninsula being “Like shrimp among whales”. By the mid-decade, the Japanese had already extracted multiple concessions from the Korean government, whom found itself increasingly torn apart over what to do with all these foreigners messing about the place. In April the 17th, a riot erupted in Seoul over troop pays and food prices, and several members from the Japanese embassy ended up dead in the crossfire. At the kingdom’s request, Qing China sent in troops to restore order while Japan sent in their troops to restore order. Neither side backed down, skirmishes ensued, the Sino-Japanese War exploded by the end of the month.

And this is where the disparity between the army and navy came back to bite Peking. They never really got the corruption out from the army, and the generals and commanders made several stupid mistakes when they tried to fight with the Koreans (Heck, the Japanese were able to march all the way to the Yalu river in 2 months!). But the Qing performed much better as they retreated north and were able to box in the fighting around Lower Manchuria while, at the same time, keeping the war from ravaging the peninsula of Liaodong. Any naval landings around Lüshunkou and Weihaiwei quickly became a meatgrinder as the incoming Japanese found themselves facing German-bought shore batteries and army after army of partly-reformed troops.

By contrast, the Qing imperial navy did horribly. Like, shoddy Imperial Russian motor-wagon horribly. The entire northern fleets got blown up at the Battle of the Yalu River while the southern fleets got their asses kicked at the Battle of Keelung, allowing the Japanese to fully encircle and invade Taiwan. This was why, when the peace negotiations started 7 months later, Tokyo was able to snag the island despite Peking’s protests. Apart from that, Korea was removed from Qing vassalage and made fully independent, and most importantly, the region of Manchuria was forced open to foreign investment, becoming the late 19th century equivalent of a Free Trade Zone.




To China and Japan, the war was a watershed. Japan showed the world that it could punch the Qing a bloody nose and influence East Asian affairs. But with that, Tokyo rankled at their army’s failed seizure of Liaodong and the coastal forts, so it probably wasn’t a surprise that the imperial navy began to gain favour amongst some power brokers afterwards. For China, the war showed how valued the military was and how much still needed to go in reforming it. Still, it was a shocking blow to Chinese prestige, and the fact that a former “little vassal” state fought them, won, and carved up Chinese territory was a bitter pill to swallow.

And like clockwork, anti-Japanese and anti-foreign sentiment was aflame yet again, some of which manifested in anti-Christian persecutions by numerous secret societies. While those in the south filled up escape boats to Malaya, Borneo, the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies, the converts in the north began gravitating to perhaps the only place that could give them work and safety, where foreign companies might protect them in exchange for their labour: Manchuria…

Oh my God, the Qing part is longer than the whole war!! Shoot!! Um... yeah, I'm really not good at writing this stuff.


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Notes:

1. See post #668 & post #861

2. Also see post #861