Late Qing China And Meiji Japan

This book looks at the confluence between Chinese and Japanese history. Focusing on the cultural and political spheres, this volume places those relationships at center stage and presents a distinct new field of Sino-Japanese interactions that, while related to Chinese and Japanese history, has an integrity of its own.

This is the first book to focus comparatively on the development processes of finance in China and Japan during the prewar period. The key issue is how to evaluate the role of government in the establishing of modern financial system. Both China and Japan started from a similar pre-modern situation in the middle of 19th century in that the monetary conditions were primitive and complicated, the traditional financial institutions were money-exchange-based, and above all, both countries had faced serious challenging pressure from the Western powers. International or domestic military affairs largely affected the development processes in both countries. While Japan succeeded in establishing its modern financial system that consistently supported its economic growth, China failed to modernize its money and banking system effectively at least until the end of World War II and the government had to change hands to the socialists, which further delayed the financial development. The experience of Japan suggests that the establishment of modern financial system may not simply be as a result of "spontaneous order", a concept used by Hayek, at least for the case of a catching-up country. The evolution process of money and banking in China shows that the role of government, especially its enforcement ability of and compliance to the rule of law may be more important than the "legal origins".

The author argues that that the political end of the Qing dynasty in 1911 was less important than the late-Qing government's own Xinzheng or "new systems" reforms.

The first Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 was fought between the decaying China of the Qing Dynasty and a dynamic and modernising Japan under the Meiji Dynasty. It was a one-sided clash which ended with a huge loss of prestige for the Qing - the dynasty was overthrown fifteen years later; - and the loss of Korea - which broke away from China to become an independent state. China was also forced to cede the island of Taiwan, the Liaodong peninsular and Penghu to Japan. This publication, compiled by the Intelligence Department of the British war Office, summarises the war.

Tracing and evaluating the development in the history of Japanese culture and society that permits Japan's rapid and continuing modernization, Professor Yoda provides a new and original approach to the modernization of Japan. He starts from the assumption that Japan was better equipped for modernization because pre-modern Japan had already started to abandon Confucian influences. In his account of modernization during the Meiji-period he focuses on general patterns inherent in Japanese culture and society enabling Japan to integrate foreign elements without having to follow foreign models slavishly. "Patterns in culture", such as the Japanese preference for juxtaposing the new and the ancient, are contrasted with China's preference for discarding past institutions in revolutionary processes. The transferability of paradigms such as "absolutism" is accepted with some modifications. In the major descriptive part of the work, the history of economic, political, institutional modernization is presented on the basis of quotations from original Japanese (and Chinese) sources, arranged within the methodological framework of universal historical concepts, indigenous cultural patterns and specific conditions in both countries. The book is composed of two articles previously published in Japanese and Chinese, two new chapters written especially for the volume, and background information provided by Professor Radtke.

Perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, the 19th century encounter between East Asia and the Western world has been narrated as a legal encounter. This book explores extraterritoriality and the ways in which Western power operated in East Asia from the 1820s to the 1920s.

This paperback edition brings together chapters from volume 5 of The Cambridge History of Japan. Japan underwent momentous changes during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. This book chronicles the hardships of the Tempo era in the 1830s, the crisis of values and confidence during the last half century of Tokugawa rule, and the political process that finally brought down the Tokugawa regime and ended centuries of warrior rule. It goes on to discuss the samurai rebellions against the Meiji Restoration, and national movements for constitutional government which indirectly resulted in the Meiji Constitution of 1889. The significance of Japan's Meiji transformation for the rest of the world is the subject of the final chapter, in which Professor Akira Iriye discusses Japan's drive to Great Power status. 'Constitutional rule at home, imperialism abroad', became new goals for early twentieth-century Japan.