to march into Manchuria from Korea, of which she already had possession.  This imperialist rivalry made war inevitable:  Russia lost the war; under the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905 Russia gave Japan the main railway through Manchuria, with adjoining territory.  Thus Manchuria became Japan’s sphere of influence and was lost to the Manchus without their being consulted in any way.  The Japanese penetration of Manchuria then proceeded stage by stage, not without occasional setbacks, until she had occupied the whole of Manchuria from 1932 to 1945.  After the end of the second world war, Manchuria was returned to China, with certain reservations in favour of the Soviet Union, which were later revoked.

11 Reform and reaction:  the Boxer Rising

China had lost the war with Japan because she was entirely without modern armament.  While Japan went to work at once with all her energy to emulate Western industrialization, the ruling class in China had shown a marked repugnance to any modernization; and the centre of this conservatism was the dowager empress Tzu Hsi.  She was a woman of strong personality, but too uneducated—­in the modern sense—­to be able to realize that modernization was an absolute necessity for China if it was to remain an independent state.  The empress failed to realize that the Europeans were fundamentally different from the neighbouring tribes or the pirates of the past; she had not the capacity to acquire a general grasp of the realities of world politics.  She felt instinctively that Europeanization would wreck the foundations of the power of the Manchus and the gentry, and would bring another class, the middle class and the merchants, into power.

There were reasonable men, however, who had seen the necessity of reform—­especially Li Hung-chang, who has already been mentioned.  In 1896 he went on a mission to Moscow, and then toured Europe.  The reformers were, however, divided into two groups.  One group advocated the acquisition of a certain amount of technical knowledge from abroad and its introduction by slow reforms, without altering the social structure of the state or the composition of the government.  The others held that the state needed fundamental changes, and that superficial loans from Europe were not enough.  The failure in the war with Japan made the general desire for reform more and more insistent not only in the country but in Peking.  Until now Japan had been despised as a barbarian state; now Japan had won!  The Europeans had been despised; now they were all cutting bits out of China for themselves, extracting from the government one privilege after another, and quite openly dividing China into “spheres of interest”, obviously as the prelude to annexation of the whole country.