Sarah Paine — How Imperial Japan defeated Tsarist Russia & Qing China

Japan in this battle is just taking anybody, young boys, old people, whoever they can put into that army, they're putting into it. If the Russians had won one more battle against the Japanese, the Japanese supply lines would have collapsed. If Japan had demanded more at those peace talks, Nicholas II would have gone back to war and he would have slaughtered them, because he had all these crack troops that are just sitting there and the Japanese literally don't have the men. Little Japan defeats the greatest land power of Asia, China. Incredible. This, uh, effect on China was far more devastating than the Opium Wars. The Chinese like to talk about these as being rebellions or uprisings. Give me a break. They're civil wars. So I'm gonna talk to you today about one of the two great generations in modern Japanese history and they are the Meiji generation, named after the Meiji Emperor here, and that generation transformed Japan into the only, and f- the first and the only non-Western modern power in that period. And the second great generation of modern Japanese is, of course, the post-war generation that transformed their country into a global powerhouse. And I'm gonna ask a question or try to both ask and answer it, is what caused the reversal of the balance of power in Asia in the period that I'm gonna talk to you about? And it's a really consequential question about why these tectonic changes take place in the international system. Because historically, uh, China had always been, uh, the dominant c- civilization in Asia from time immemorial, and then upstart Japan, um, winds up doing things, or China winds up doing things, and it reverses, and it has profound effects. And it's a very relevant question in our own day when there's a- an ongoing reversal of the reversal, when China's on the comeback and, uh, threatening to put Japan back in its box. So it's really interesting to ask why, how do these things happen? So that's the background of what I'm, uh, talking about. But if you think about China back in the day before Japan trounced China in the first Sino-Japanese War, Chinese believed that there's only one civilization. Theirs, naturally. And they believed that, of course, it's the best 'cause there's only one. That makes it easily the best. But, uh, in ad- (laughs) in addition, there, y- if you think about all levels of, of human endeavor, Chinese institutions were imitated throughout the East. It's the richest country on, on the planet for many, many years. Um, incredible achievements in science, philosophy, you name it. And also there was another assumption that, uh, people didn't make a U-turn on the path to civilization. It's always forward towards Chinese civilization. Well, Japan, um, by westernizing, is taking a U-turn on the road to civilization. It's dumping, uh, Chinese civilization, and so already we got least two civilizations out there. And then when it trounces China in a war, uh, it suggests to the Chinese that they can't be better than the Japanese at the military things at least. And this, uh, effect on China was far more devastating than the Opium Wars. So you... the Chinese could write those off, the losses there, bunch of crazy Europeans, they're irrelevant to us. But when Japan did this, it basically detonated the Confucian underpinnings of Chinese civilization and the Chinese have been trying to find a suitable replacement ever since. For a while, they thought it was communism. Maybe they still do. So I'm gonna ask a question. Why did the Asian balance of power change? And now spoiler alert, I'm gonna give the answer. Um, and I'm gonna say clever decisions in Tokyo. But I'm gonna use a particular framework to answer this that I have found really useful and I learned it from teaching at the Naval War College where students are required to have a counterargument in papers and this is, um, what I learned from doing this. So I'm gonna have an argument, which is a thesis and then I'll have some data supporting it, but then I'm not gonna quit there. I'm gonna do... find th- the second best argument, the counterargument, the absolutely best alternate explanation, but not one that I think is the best one. I'm gonna give you the best one. That's my thesis, and I'm gonna go into that and it's incredibly valuable, particularly in our own fraught, uh, political times where, um, we need to hear each other out. You need to hear out the counterargument of what the other side is saying. And then what you'll often find out in a counterargument is that there are actually some very valid points in it and it leads you to think, "Oh, well, maybe I need to adjust my own argument." So changing your mind is a good idea s- if the data comes in. Also, it gets you away from mono-causal explanations where you come up with one cause, you think, "That's it. Time to quit." And if you're thinking about the counterargument, you might get other causes as well. Also, if you're gonna do something like on a job and you have to recommend a course of action, your thesis, you had better anticipate what the counterargument's gonna be and then the third part of this is the rebuttal, because you better come into that, um, meeting your boss with a retta- rebuttal in your back pocket so that you can deal with people who are saying you're wrong. And the rebuttal cannot be a repetition of the original argument 'cause you know what? That's annoying. Don't do that. Really annoying. The most effective ones are coming at the problem from a completely different, uh, direction from either argument or counterargument that then shores up your argument and my other direction is I got a Sino-Japanese problem and I'm gonna come around with a Russia angle. So this is my game plan of what I'm planning to do and the analytical reasons for doing it. Okay, so I have a thesis which I'm gonna give to you. Uh, when... in emails and written work and... lectures like this one. You really help people if you explain exactly what you're up to and you do it succinctly at the very beginning, so here it is. The Japanese leaders westernized their institutions, they integrated multiple instruments of national power into a coherent strategy, and then in the Russo-Japanese War, they quit that one exactly at the culminating point of victory for maximum gains, and together these three things overturned the balance of power in their favor. That's my thesis. Short, sweet. You've got it whether you agree with it or not, we'll, we will get there. Okay, so now I'm going to go to the first point. First points, you should start with a topic sentence. I'm gonna start one. Why am I doing this? This is, these are all sign post- posts to orient you to my argument so that you can absorb it. And also if you don't like it, it, you can see very clearly the parts that you don't like, and we can get in a fun conversation. So, my topic sentence for the westernization part is Ja- Japanese leaders concluded that in order to parry the threat of the Industrial Revolution, of all these imperial powers coming at them, was they needed to westernize their institutions in order to protect their national interests, that this was step one. So that's my topic sentence. Okay. So, what's going on? The Industrial Revolution started in England, or, uh, Britain more generally, in the late 18th century. It spreads to the continent after the Napoleonic Wars die down at the beginning of the 19th century. By the bid- mid-19th century, it had reached Asia. And it's profoundly disruptive to traditional societies whose, uh, traditional security paradigms no longer work when they're facing the weaponry of the industrialized age coming at them. And what the Industrial Revolution does, and why it's so revolutionary, is it produces compounded economic growth. Traditional societies are pretty much, pretty stable, but when you do compounding economic growth, the difference in power and wealth becomes stark between those who do and those who don't. And it's also based not only on technological changes, right, whether you've got all these fancy armaments and railways and telegraphs, but it's also based on institutions. What are institutions? They're how we organize each other. So when you think of institutions, you think of the buildings where people are, but that's not it. It's the people in there who are working on a shared project together, whatever, or a shared area of activity, and, uh, this is one of the hallmarks of Western civilization. This is what the Romans figured out, of institutions and laws, that this is a way of really harnessing people, and it's profoundly powerful. So I'll go into all of that. So Japan's looking at the world with this incoming industrial revolution, or, or the powers that have benefited from it, and it's watching its neighbor, China, being defeated twice in war, and they're horrified, not just appalled. And, um, so they're looking at it and going, "You know what? Maybe we'll be next." And they're right. The United States does unto Japan what Britain and France did unto China. What's that? The treaty port system. What it meant is that trade in Japan and China would take place in designated treaty ports, that the West would set tariffs on this trade, and that Western citizens in China or Japan would, uh, in these treaty ports, would not be subjected to Chinese or Japanese law, but home country law. And when Chinese and Japanese citizens were in Europe and the United States, they most certainly were not dealing with home country law. They were dealing with US or Western law, so it was not reciprocal in any way. In addition, each one of these treaties had a most favored nation clause in it which said the, the, the one who's negotiating this treaty, the most favored one, whatever they negotiate will be given to everybody else. So it meant whatever, uh, uh, one could negotiate accrued to them all. It meant that China, uh, lost sovereign- Japan lost their sovereignty when these treaties go in. And so the Japanese, unlike China, which fights war after war with these Westerners, trying to defeat them militarily and is unsuccessful, the Japanese say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We're gonna assess what the nature of the problem is." And they sent, uh, fact-finding mission after fact-finding mission to Europe primarily, but also the United States. This is just the most famous one, the Iwakura Mission, which is off to the west in the United States as well in 1871. And they're studying not only Western military instrument, institutions, but a whole array of political, economic, legal, social, educational, the works, to understand the basis for Western power and the problem that is hitting them, and they arrive in Europe at a really interesting time. It's when Otto von Bismarck is just finishing up the third war of the unification of the Germanic states, and the Japanese think, "Ooh, this might be quite a model for us." Why? 'Cause Prussia transformed itself over a succession of three wars from the weakest of the five great European powers to second only to Great Britain, and it did so in part by unifying the Germanic states into modern Germany. And the Japanese are thinking, "Wow, this might be relevant to us because we're divided up into all these feudal domains that we have just tried to glue together, and what are the lessons to be learned here?" And as they're thinking about this and watching what Bismarck is up to, they come upon, uh, thinking about institutions and technology-And modernizat- I'm gonna use the words in the following sense, modernization means, uh, adopting the most state of the art technology, whatever it is. Not just military technology, um, but ce- uh, all, all manner of, uh, technology. And Westernization, the way I'm gonna use it, means adopting Westernized institutions and I don't mean just military institutions, I mean everything, from whether you Westernize your educational institutions or political, whatever it is. And the question is can you have one without the other? Can you modernize and have all the fancy, uh, gadgets and things without having the Westernized institutions that the societies that created these things had? And if you think about it, this dichotomy is still with us. There are a lot of fighters in the Middle East and North Africa who are more than happy to use state of the art technology, but the last thing they want is Westernized institutions. And the Japanese, when they posed this question back in the day, the Si- a- asking whether you can have one without the other, they de- decided the answer was no. They didn't particularly like Western culture, but they believed that in order to have, um, to not only use and import state of the art technology but become an independent producer of it, you've got to do some degree of Westernization. So they get home, they set themselves a policy objective which is to protect Japanese national security and sovereignty in an age of accelerating imperialism, and they come up with a two-phase grand strategy to do this. It's gonna be start with a domestic phase of Westernization, Westernize their institutions, and then they're gonna, when they're done with that, they're gonna have a foreign policy phase which is gonna be about starting an empire. Why do that? Because they look at all the powers of their day and think, "What's a great power look like in those days?" Well, it has an empire, so they go, "Well, we're gonna have an empire." All right. These- this is the domestic phase, these are known as the Meiji reforms in honor of the emperor who reigned in this period. It's between 1869, 1890, it's a whole generation. And if you look at them, they, uh, only two of them pertain to the military. There's the draft and then creating, uh, the general staff, and then if you look at the, the two that started all, they started at the top of the social pyramid with the feudal domains, that's the, uh, the, the power brokers of Japan, and they're getting rid of all of those, and then they go right to the bottom of the social p- pyramid, which is children, and deciding that they need to have compulsory elementary education because they don't believe you can have a modern country, a strong country without a literate population. But if you look at the rest of these things, you're getting a Bank of Japan, you're gonna be having something running your currency and other things, you've got a cabinet, a higher education, you're gonna have a professional civil service, constitution, a parliament, you're gonna have a court system that looks like a Western court system with laws that look an awful lot like Western laws. As a result of doing all of this, the Westerners had no excuse left for having a treaty port system because this mirrors what's going on in the West. So Britain, which is the precedent setter in these things, the superpower of its day, it renegotiates its treaties with Japan on the basis of juridical equality, and the other powers follow suit and do it. This happens in Japan a half century before China gets rid of its unequal treaties. All right. So domestic phase is over the moment, um, Japan signs that treaty with Britain. The foreign policy phase has to do with Japan believes it needs an empire and its neighborhood is a mess. China is imploding for various reasons, which I will get to, and Korea's even worse. And China, because it's having a massive civil wars throughout China, can no longer fulfill its suzerain role to stabilize Korea, and the Korean royal house is busy mailing package bombs to each other. I kid you not. They're blowing each other up. What Japan is terribly concerned about is that Russia might try to fill this power vacuum. Why would Japan think that? Well, it's the Trans-Siberian Railway, that Russia decides in 1891 it's gonna build a Trans-Siberian Railway. To exactly what? Uh, there is no Russian population out there, and Japan understands exactly what it is. It's a bid for empire in Asia. Because once Russia completes this thing, it's gonna overturn the Asian balance of power because Russia's gonna be able to deploy troops where nobody else can. Therefore, treaty revision happens on the 16th of July, 1894. That's when it's signed on the dotted line with, with Britain. Nine days later, Japan fires the opening shots of the first Sino-Japanese War. And the Japanese fight three wars of Russian containment. I'm gonna talk to you about the two that went well for them today. The third one's a whole other topic. The first one's the first Sino-Japanese War when little Japan defeats the greatest land power of Asia, China. Incredible. The second one, which I'll get to a decade later, is the Russo-Japanese War when the Japanese defeat, sorry, spoiler alert, um, Russia, the greatest land empire of Europe. Amazing that they can do this. And the third one does not go nearly as well. That would be the second Sino-Japanese War from 1931 to 1945 that morphs into World War II that ruins the Japanese, but it's a different topic-... first Sino-Japanese War, to let you know what happened in it. It's comprised of two pairs of key battles. There are other battles as well, but this is a good way to understand it. The first battle is at Pyongyang. The Japanese defeat the Chinese army, which takes off and retreats all the way over the border river, which is the Yalu, back into Chinese territory. So Japan has actually achieved its war objective, which was to remove Korea from the Chinese sphere of influence. Battle number one, they've already done it. And the second battle occurs within the week, the same week, in mid-September 1894. It's the Battle of the Yalu, where the Japanese Navy trounces the Chinese Navy, which believe it or not, in this day, both countries had state-of-the-art navies. And Japan trounces it and gets command of the sea. That's terribly important for Japan. For Japan to reach the theater here, it's got to cross the sea. If there's a hostile navy out and about, it can sink troop transports, supplies, and other things. So it's very important to get rid of hostile navy. Well, the reason it gets command of the sea is because the Chinese decide they're never gonna engage with the Chi- with the Japanese Navy ever again, and they duck into port. Uh, and the Chinese are gonna solve that problem for them. There are a second pair of battles which are fought over the winter of 1894-95. China only has one naval refitting station where you can actually fix large ships. That's at Port Arthur. And they will take it by land, the same way they're gonna take it in the Russo-Japanese War. The Chinese fleet, what's left of it, flees to Weihaiwei, hang out in port. Japan lands an army on the Shandong Peninsula there, and also it blockades with its navy, and then the army turns the landward guns on the ships in port and they sink them all. And that is the end of that war. Okay. Here's what Japan got out of this war, and what I've got is a very simple framework, domestic, regional, international. This is a way for, to help you, uh, remember what I'm gonna tell you. Three-part frameworks, uh, are helpful for getting information to other people. Domestically, this victory in this war validated a very controversial Westernization program. All those Meiji reforms which sound so great in retrospect, uh, actually the Japanese population didn't like them. Who wants their kids being sent to, uh, elementary school if they were working on the farm before? And who wants this Westernized curriculum? Who likes Westerners anyway? And people are wearing all this Western clothing and stuff. It's crazy land. Why would anyone like that? Uh, once Japan wins this war and trounces China, a lot of Japanese have second thoughts about this. They're quite proud of their achievements, and it vastly increases the prestige of th- the military, particularly the army, and this is gonna have bad follow-on effects for civil-military relations because it's gonna increase military power over civil, uh, power. But it takes a while to play out. Regionally, Japan is replacing China as the dominant power, and Japan's getting the begin- beginnings of its empires, Taiwan and the Pescadors. Internationally, Japan becomes a recognized great power. And what's my proof? It would be the 1902 Anglo-Japanese Alliance, which is Britain's only long-term alliance between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I, alliance with Japan. However, this war gets the Eye of Mordor turned onto them because Russia is going, "Whoa, uh, rising power in Asia. Potential two-front war problem for us, with Europe and the West and whatever the Japanese think they're doing," and it triggers a Russo-Japanese arms race. And Russia, the Eye of Mordor turns from Europe to Asia, and that's gonna, uh, be problematic. So now my transition sentence. I've done part number one. Uh, not only did Japan Westernize its institutions in order to overturn the balance of power, but it also mastered grand strategy and integrated multiple instruments of national power. And here we go on that one. Marshal, uh, Yamagata, who was the writer of war plans for the very successful Sino-Japanese War, uh, he predicted another war within the decade, and the Russo-Japanese War came right on time. And in the meantime, Japan prepared for war, and it integrated, uh, such instruments of national power as diplomacy, intelligence, military, economics. I'm gonna go through each in turn, starting with diplomacy. Here you have Sun Tzu, who's China's big gur- uh, guru, Art of War, who's talking about, it's really important to disrupt alliances. In modern terminology, that would be isolating the adversary, that that might be a good thing to do. And that's the purpose of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. How does that work? What it says, its terms say that if more than one European power comes to Asia to fight Japan, that means Russia plus one European buddy, then Britain is gonna weigh in on Japan's side. So Britain is the number one power I- in Europe, so why would you ever want to help Russia out? Because it won't go well with you if Britain is on Japan's side. This alliance goes into effect, uh, from 1902 to nine- to 1907, it's a five-year event, opening a window of opportunity for Japan to sort out its empire in Asia. But the Trans-Siberian Railway, when it gets completed, is gonna threaten to close that window, and here's why. The Trans-Siberian Railway in those days, it's not north of the Amur. It's actually straight through Manchuria, this Chinese Eastern Railway. It's a- Russia's bid for empire of trying to control Manchuria. And it was unfinished. Uh, it hadn't been double-tracked, so that means you're always having to push, push trains off so, uh, other trains can pass them in the other direction. It's missing its Lake Baikal link. Don't think lake, think Switzerland. Lake Baikal is about the size of Switzerland. And the Boxer Rebellion, the Al-Qaeda of their day, and I'll get to them, uh, had destroyed much of the track, really upsetting the Russians. As a result of all of this, at the beginning of the Russo-Japanese War, which begins in 1904, the carrying capacity of that railway was only 20 to, or to 40,000 men per month to the front. By the end of the war, the last battle, it's 100,000 men per month. If those numbers had been available at the beginning of the war, Japan would have faced numerically s- uh, superior Russians from start to finish and would have been in a world of hurt. So Japan has got a, a window of opportunity that it's warring about.... uh, sorting things out. In addition, Japan engages in a really big military buildup. It gets a really big indemnity from the first Sino-Japanese War and it spends it, and that spending is finished at around 1901, meaning it's about ready to go to war. At the time the war breaks out, Russian naval assets in Asia were about three-quarters those of Japan, but Russia was s- uh, scheduled to surpass Japan's naval assets, uh, by about 1905. Again, you could see this window of opportunity threatening to shut. So if you look at it, Japan's window of opportunity of getting its empire, if that's what it thinks it wants, it, you gotta have treaty versio- vision in place, you've gotta isolate Russians, make sure that there's gonna be no other power interfering in these things, you gotta have your rearmament program. But look, this window is very short. It's gonna close in 1905-ish. And the th- uh, the, when you think of windows of opportunities, what they mean is whatever it is you plan to do has to be completed before it slams shut. If you're on the wrong side of the window, which is what happens to Japan in the second Sino-Japanese War, you are in a world of hurt. In addition, what it means is actually time is on the side of your adversary. It is a sign of weakness, not strength. The Japanese are looking at the Russians who are procrastinating. The Japanese are telling them, "Hey, we will trade, uh, recognition of your dominance of Manchuria if you'll, uh, recognize our dominance in Korea." The Russians didn't wanna do anything. They're procrastinating and trying to go beyond this window, and the Japanese are thinking, "Uh, we gotta sort it out before that happens." So another, uh, element of national power are psychological... PSYOPs as the US military likes to call them, psychological operations, and the Japanese, uh, were engaged in a really wide array of them, both at the front, at, in Russia and across the Russian Empire. At the front, the Japanese were secreting and all kinds of postcards for their Russian recruits there, showing the, the great life as a POW in rather posh Japanese c- accommodations, as opposed to the really bad life of getting disabled or killed in the front. Meanwhile, Russia was the only... I think there are only three European countries, including Russia, that lacked a legislature in this period. I think Montenegro is one of them, and maybe the Ottoman Empire might be the other one. Japan had a legislature. Russian population's sick of it, the war wasn't going well, and they start hitting the streets in the Russian Revolution, and Japan wants to advertise that to the troops. You want things to be stirred up in Russia so that Russia has to pull troops back into European Russia, so they're doing all of that. And then, um, this gentleman, he was a colonel back in the day, Colonel Akashi, but he's a general by the time this picture is taken of him. He's working in the Japanese legation in Stockholm, and he's busy cutting checks to Finnish and Polish revolutionaries who are part of the Russian Empire and want out, trying to stir things up there to have Russia, uh, have to be forced to pull the troops out of Asia. And then the Japanese have this gentleman in their employ and a lot of other people, Yuan Shikai. He is key in overthrowing the Qing Dynasty and becomes China's first president. But back in the day, he's running reconnaissance missions for the Japanese, telling them what the Russians are up to. And then, um, and when little detachments of Russian troops try to go out and about, um, these people are harassing them, which doesn't help Russian morale. Also, the Japanese are being really good about purchases from Manchurians. They aren't just taking things from people. They're actually paying, so they're triggering an economic boom in Manchuria, which means locals like them. And then, um, the Japanese also figure how to tap into Russian fleet communications so they know where the Russian fleet is most convenient. So this is the information element of national power. And then there's economics. Two-fifths of this war for the Japan- Japanese side is paid for with loans, so if they don't get the loans, they can't wage the war. In fact, one of the reasons Russia has to call it quits at the end of the war is when it tries to raise a final w- loan, uh, it failed. No one, uh, no one will pay for it. But the Japanese, uh, loans depend on battlefield success, as do interest rates, so if you're excess- successful in the field, the interest rates go down. So Japan is doing quite well with all of this. So, um, if you sum it all up, you can go the Japanese used diplomacy to isolate their adversary with this UK alliance. They used all these psychological operations to promote revolution and, uh, desertions. They're using the, uh, military, uh, uh, instrument to fund their rearmament, and then they've got the economics going with all of these loans. The US military is really partial to a Reagan-era acronym of DIME. Right? You can see here the D is for diplomacy, I is for information, M is for military, E is economic. Sounds like a bad, I don't know, cheerleading routine. Um, it's inadequate. Uh, it may be a place to start. It's cute and all that stuff, but cute does not mean complete. Think about it. One of the most important factors in this war, bar none, certainly for Russia, is railways. I don't see an R in there or, uh, anything. So by all means, this is better than only looking at military factors, but it's incomplete. (air whooshing)