The Russo-Japanese Alliance of 1902
The possibility of an alliance between Japan and Russia had been first entertained during the Spanish-Japanese War, which saw the Japanese essentially beg for Russian intervention against Spain to no avail - the Russians really did not see why the war ought to include them. However, the Japanese purchase of Alaska after the war drew the two nations far closer than anyone had expected, which was one of the strategic goals the Russian foreign ministry had in selling Aljaska to Japan. Immediately, the British viewed Japan's rise in East Asia as a threat to their own interests, especially with Great Britain being the dominant investor in Qing China.
Qing China had left World War I feeling like a definitive victor, having essentially defeated a Western nation in the field on at least front (the Central Asian front was a catastrophe for Qing forces) by actually surging into Russia territory, briefly occupying Vladivostok, and forcing the Russians (and most importantly the Russian Navy) to withdraw from Vladivostok as a demilitarized zone. However, this cemented essentially most of Qing China's neighbors as implacable enemies. The "two Oriental Empires", namely the Ottoman Empire and the Qing Empire, became named in Russian propaganda as the enemy, as Russian propaganda quickly declared both the Ottoman Turks and Qing Manchu as part of an "ancient Tatar race fought by the Russian race since time immemorial." Unsurprisingly, this discourse only drew the Qing and Ottoman Empires much closer to each other, who saw common ground due to their mutually close relations with Great Britain and their seemingly similar attempts to imitate British-style parliamentary monarchy. For what it was worth, the Ottomans actually came much closer to emulating the British government as it stood - the Qing Government was merely a pale imitation where the Parliament had little actual power (most power in the central power was held in the the Qing Privy Council, comprised of Manchu aristocrats, while most actual power was held by predominantly Han warlord-viceroys in the various viceroyalties. Not only were Russia and Japan mutual threats, but so was France, who sat on Qing-claimed Taiwan, and worst of all, France was increasingly the primary commercial partner of Russia, with French finance sponsoring many of Russia's massive factories and railroads.
In Japan itself, the Russophile Enomoto grew to unrivaled influence after his naval ideas were seemingly vindicated by the Spanish-Japanese war. Enomoto had famously fought for the Shogunal forces in the Boshin Wars, even fleeing to Hokkaido and attempting to gain Russian support for an independent Hokkaido. Now, as the man of the hour in a unified Japan, Enomoto immediately responded to Russian overtures with glee, immediately hammering out a mutual defense treaty with the Russians. One of the agreements was to final settle the Sakhalin issue - the island had been claimed by both Russia and Japan for decades, and the two governments agreed that the land would be technically Russians, but that Japanese would have free reign to settle in Sakhalin (with appropriate autonomy granted). With the final debating point between the two nations solved, the two quickly entered into a diplomatic agreement that enshrined their respective obligations to defend each other. Most terrifyingly to the British was the informal Russo-Japanese Agreement to immediately embark on a massive joint shipbuilding program. The British were already informed of an informal agreement between Russian and French shipyards (they generally shared technology and personnel) - now, Japan had joined in.
The British, seeing three hostile navy powers aligning against them, quickly accelerated their creation of the world's first all-big-gun ship. In 1903, the HMS Dreadnought began construction, sparking a massive arms race between the United Kingdom and several powers. It quickly became the goal of the Royal Navy to outnumber the French, Russian, and Japanese fleets combined. In many ways, this would present a massive strain on the finances of France and Russia, who would also have a policy of fielding the second and first largest armies in Europe. This became a further strain once the Italians saw a French naval buildup as a possible threat against them - also joining in. However, the Italians, believing in the Alps as a proper barrier between them and France, decided not to engage in a similar land army build-up, realizing that a build-up could trigger an Austrian rearmament. The Italians spoke regularly with the North Germans, who agreed that a military build-up was undesirable. The North Germans decided to simply give up entirely on the naval race, simply selling off the products of their shipyards to the Italians, Ottomans, the Qing, and eventually the Confederates. Instead, the North Germans and the Italians simply decided to build a series of forts on their respective borders with Italy, which quickly became known as the Siegfried Line and the Pelloux Line. The North Germans, with their large industrial base but relatively low population (in 1900, under 40 million, compared to over 50 million for Austria, over 40 million for France, over 40 million for Great Britain, and over 130 million for Russia), focused on simply having more and bigger and better artillery than any other power, a fact they hoped to hide because of the relatively normal size of their army.
As a cultural phenomenon, the Russo-JApanese Alliance would cause an explosion of interest in Japanese culture in France and Russia, but it would also inspire Japanese political thinkers to look primarily towards France and Russia. Conservative Japanese landowners, who had dominated the Imperial Diet, saw much to admire in their Russian counterparts. Russian literature, including both Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (celebrated by the state), and Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons (not celebrated by the state), became wildly popular in Japan. The Japanese government began work on synthesizing both "Pochvennichestvo"-style return to soil Russian ideology, with both Japan and East Korea attempting to intentionally synthesize such ideas with traditional Chinese thought. Both Japan and East Korea regularly declared themselves as the last bastion of classical Chinese civilization, explicitly comparing the Qing Dynasty as akin to the Ottomans sitting on Constantinople. Whereas Russia called itself the Third Rome, the East Koreans and Japanese each called themselves respectively the Second China and the Third China (they differed on whether the Manchu invasions of Korea 'extinguished' Chinese civilization in Korea). Chinese radicals would regularly go to Tokyo, the global center of classical Chinese philosophy, infused with exotic Russian ideas such as Narodism, which quickly grew to be a popular form of resistance against the Qing government.
Elite Qing society took a totally different intellectual turn. Although many Chinese intellectuals looked to Russia and Japan as their source of intellectual inspiration, the government at least looked towards their great benefactor, Great Britain. Hume, Locke, Burke, and other names quickly became a household name at Chinese universities. Many top officials in the Chinese government, such as Kang Youwei, began as members of the Fabian Society, eventually forming the soon-to-be-influential Fabian Circle of Qing politicians. Ironically, because the Qing Empire was so heavily dominated by aristocrats, aristocrats adopting Fabianism as a sign of erudition became better at implementing its ideas than the actual parliamentary British government. In theory, the Qing Empire became one of the first nations to establish universal social security and a minimum wage (even if in practice the minimum wage rapidly became lower than most jobs due to high rates of inflation and most people died before being old enough to collect social security). The most important introduction was the Imperial Health Service (IHS), which provided free albeit extremely low quality public health counselling to most of rural China, a public reform that actually first began under the viceroy Li Hongzhang based on British donations and quickly spread as the other viceroys sought to outcompete him. Although extremely rudimentary and low-budget, this maneuver quickly reconciled much of the Qing peasantry to the new government, which quickly grew to be supported by a strange circle of close-knit Manchu aristocrats around the Emperor, a large peasantry, a close set of Han viceroys (de facto warlords), and pretty much nobody else, as the government still refused to make genuine political reforms or invest in technological advances, alienating much of the middle-class and intellectuals.