The East Asian Dimension of the First World War

Acknowledgements
For this edited volume we would, of course, first and foremost like to give thanks to our authors. This publication is the result of the international symposium "The East Asian Dimension of the First World War: The German-Japanese War and China, 1914-1919", which was held at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum in 2014 and was attended by more than 100 historians from Germany, Austria, Great Britain, Japan, the People's Republic of China and Taiwan. Most of the authors featured in this book gave presentations at the symposium. We furthermore invested considerable time in trying to secure the participation of a small number of additional authors as this would enable us to consider the topic from further, important angles. To all of the authors we owe thanks for their trust and their endless patience, with which they dealt with our frequent queries and requests during the extended period it took for this book to take shape.
Some contributions needed to be translated from Japanese into English, which was executed by Angelika Koch (Ghent) and David de Cooman (Leuven) with great linguistic and subject-specific competence. Maren Barton was in charge of the copy editing and completed a number of translations from German into English, with Iain Sinclair also contributing translations.
At the KU Leuven the doctoral candidates Maj Hartmann, Eline Mennens and Lieven Sommen as well as the student assistant Bert Colin contributed considerably to the completion of this volume.
Our colleagues from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Rüdiger Breuer (Sinology) and Thorsten Traulsen (Korean Studies) were always available with help and advice when we needed to solve problems with the transcription from Chinese and Korean. Should there be any errors in this regard, however, they are ours alone.
Furthermore we would like to express our gratitude to everyone who enabled our project financially: the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Japan Foundation - Japanisches Kulturinstitut, the Stiftung zur Förderung japanisch-deutscher Wissenschafts- und Kulturbeziehungen (JaDe-Stiftung), the Deutsche Gesellschaft der JSPS-Stipendiaten e.?V. (JSPS-Club) and the National Museum of Japanese History. Without their support the symposium, from which this volume of articles eventually grew, would not have been able to happen. The Freie Universität Berlin and the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, where we were working at the time, supported the symposium in many ways, both financially and in terms of staffing resources. Our special thanks go to Regine Mathias, the then professor of Japanese History at the Department of East Asian Studies at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, who became the patron-in-chief of the symposium, as well as our then research assistants Juliane Böhm (Berlin) and Teelka Groeneveld (Bochum), who took on most of the organisational duties. The team of interpreters around Yoko Shinohe produced outstanding work covering German, English, Japanese and Chinese. We also would like to thank Susanne Formanek, Gerhard Hirschfeld, Oliver Janz, Kataoka Ichiro, Hans-Joachim Schmidt, Tajima Nobuo and Matthias Zachmann for their contributions to the conference.
Last but not least we would like to thank Jürgen Hotz, who oversaw the publication of this volume at Campus patiently and enthusiastically and always gave us valuable advice, and the editors of the series "Eigene und Fremde Welten" for including this volume.
The East Asian Dimension of
the First World War: An Introduction
Jan Schmidt and Katja Schmidtpott
In December 1914, about three months after the start of the First World War, the new Tokyo central railway station opened. Just a few weeks later it was the scene of a triumphal welcoming celebration for the Japanese troops that were returning from the German-leased area around the Chinese port of Qingdao on the Shandong peninsula, which the Japanese army had managed to take following several weeks of besieging the city and heavy fighting. Then, in the summer of 1918, the square in front of the station served as the site for exhibiting a British tank, as can be seen on the cover of this volume. This tank was a wooden model of a slightly smaller scale than the real early tanks that had been used in increasing numbers on the European Western front. Just like gas masks, submarines and fighter planes, the tanks had long since become a familiar sight even in East Asia due to their manifold representations in the media. The wooden tank, as the Japanese daily newspaper Tokyo Asahi Shinbun reported, formed part of a so-called "tank week", a global publicity campaign by the allied power Great Britain for the purchase of British government bonds. The tank therefore was exhibited in a variety of public places throughout Tokyo and Yokohama from July 1, 1918 onwards. Over the course of just six days almost 3,000,000 Yen's worth of bonds were sold, which at the time was a huge sum. During the spring of the same year a similar "tank week" had taken place in Shanghai.
The previous year, on February 25, 1917, the Tokyo Asahi Shinbun had run a report on the sinking of the French troop carrier Athos, which had been torpedoed by a German submarine in the Mediterranean a few days earlier. The ship had been on its way back from East Asia to Europe after carrying 40 Japanese war volunteers in the opposite direction, from France to Japan, in December 1916. These war volunteers-originally work migrants from New Caledonia-had been denied permission to participate in the war by the Japanese Foreign Ministry (Gaimusho). On its return journey to Europe the Athos was carrying not just African colonial troops but also hundreds of Chinese workers from Shandong, who formed part of the 145,000 Chinese who had been recruited by France and Great Britain to support the Entente's military machine behind the Western front. The sinking of the Athos cost the lives of 543 Chinese workers, and the news of this event was one of the factors that made China renounce its neutrality and declare war on the Central Powers.
Both the wooden tank outside Tokyo train station and the fate of the ship Athos represent aspects of the East Asian dimension of the First World War. Nonetheless, although these individual events seem tiny compared to the large-scale battles raging in Europe, they are not marginalia of history. Rather, they exemplify the manyfold entanglements of East Asia and East Asians with the First World War-what we call its East Asian Dimension.
Different aspects of this East Asian dimension, which scholarship has often overlooked so far, will be examined in this volume. In so doing, it is a central aim of this volume to include new studies that have been published by historians from the East Asian region over the last decade, largely as part of the global centennial of the First Word War. Most of their work has so far barely been considered in English-language research as it had generally been published in East Asian languages only.
To help the reader situate the topics of the 16 contributions of this volume, this introduction will first give a short overview of the East Asian Dimension of the First World War on the basis of the body of already existing scholarship and then discuss problems of historiography, especially in the East Asian countries. Finally all contributions will be briefly introduced, followed by a critical evaluation of the desiderata of current scholarship, including this volume, that might remain with regard to the East Asian dimension of the First World War.
The First World War and East Asia
East Asia emerged already early on as part of the global dimension of the First World War. On the side of the Entente Powers, the Japanese Empire declared war on the German Empire on August 23, 1914 and subsequently also on Austria-Hungary. This happened only a few weeks after fighting had broken out across large parts of Europe following a whole cascade of declarations of war. Subsequently, the empires of the major European powers also became part of the mobilisation efforts for the war. Japan engaged in outright military action against Germany in the Asia-Pacific region, later it supported British naval forces in the Mediterranean, and then joined the Siberian intervention from 1918 to 1922 as a major force. The war against Germany, which in Japan is remembered as the "Japanese-German War" (Nichi-Doku senso) of 1914, resulted in the acquisition of the German-leased territory of Qingdao in China and the German colonies in the South Pacific. However, as a result of the Western powers' interference it had to hand back Qingdao to China in 1922 and received the former German colonies in the Pacific as a mandate by the League of Nations in 1919. The Siberian Intervention ended in a domestically highly unpopular political disaster, with no tangible outcome in terms of territorial acquisitions and a comparatively high number of Japanese casualties. While Japan finished the war as one of the five major powers at the Paris Peace Conference as a result of its engagement in the war, the long-term outcome for Japan has been described as ambiguous by many historians, as tensions with China heightened over the issues of Japan's expansionist policy in China as reflected in the so-called Twenty-One Demands of 1915, and also with the United States over the issue of competing spheres of influence in the Pacific. At the same time the Japanese public was outraged by the decision in Paris not to include in the Covenent of the League of Nations a "Racial Equality" clause that Japan had submitted. The outbreak of the war in Europe led to a relative absence in China of the major European powers, who had had a strong position there before. Japan decided to capitalise on this situation by confronting the young Republic of China with the notorious Twenty-One Demands. They were intended to transfer the rights to the German-leased area of Qingdao to Japan, to ensure the renewal of existing Japanese rights that had been bestowed between 1895 and 1905, and to force the granting of extensive privileges for Japan in China.
Korea had been a part of the Japanese Empire since its annexation in 1910. Koreans striving to regain Korean independence were hoping-in vain, as it turned out-to be able to use the war and the subsequent Paris Peace Conference for their aims.
China remained neutral until August 1917 when it declared war on the Central Powers. China's intention was that at the peace conference, which it was expecting to take place at the end of the war, it would be able to raise the Chinese position in the world and in East Asia. In particular it wanted the German privileges on the Shandong peninsula to be annulled. Ideally China also wanted to retract other privileges of different major powers that had been granted under duress during the time of 19th century informal imperialism and during the Boxer Rebellion. However, although China remained a neutral state until 1917, the largest active participation from East Asia in the military conflict in a wider sense came from there, in the form of 145,000 Chinese workers recruited by Great Britain and France. The majority of these workers came from the Shandong peninsula which was under de facto Japanese domination after the occupation of Qingdao and the former German railway network, with the Japanese actively supporting the English and French recruitment effort. Around an additional 150,000 Chinese workers migrated to Russia during the First World War, with many of them becoming embroiled in the Russian Revolution and the subsequent civil war.
After a short period of strong uncertainty on the East Asian markets due to shortages and cancellations of imports from Europe and the consequent price rises, from 1915 onwards the war resulted in economic growth that was strong in the Japanese Empire and significant in China. Within a few months Japanese companies were receiving a continually increasing number of orders from Entente countries. These orders were for the production of goods that were needed for the war effort but also to replace other products that could no longer be made in sufficient amounts in the Entente nations due to their shift towards a war economy. In parallel to this and similar to US companies, Japanese and, partially at least, Chinese companies were able successfully to fill those gaps on the large Chinese market, as well as in South and South East Asia in general, that had been created on the one hand by the British blockades of German ports and the resulting absence of deliveries from Germany and, on the other hand, by the Entente countries' focus on the production of essential war goods instead of their former strong export orientation.
The strong growth in exports gave a boost to Japan's internal economy, especially in the cities where heavy industry expanded. It also provided the Japanese state with record-breaking tax revenues which enabled it to transform itself on the international capital markets from a major debtor to a creditor nation. The late phase of the war, however, saw a steep rise in price levels in the country that undid, in real terms, the wage increases from the beginning of the boom period. In 1917 and 1918 this led to a massive crisis that culminated in the Rice Riots of the summer of 1918. These Rice Riots and the extremely harsh way they were dealt with brought about a political crisis that resulted in the fall of Terauchi Masatake's cabinet in September 1918 and led to the cabinet of Hara Takashi, which was the first of the so-called "era of party cabinets" (1918-1932), a period of democratisation and liberalisation.
Despite the fact that a post-war economic crisis had been anticipated by political, economic and academic elites since the beginning of the strong economic growth in 1915, this bust initially did not materialise in the immediate aftermath of the armistice in Europe in 1918. This resulted in a period of massive speculation throughout 1919 and the spring of 1920 that ended abruptly when the speculation bubble burst. The economic crisis of 1920 can be considered one of the most severe in Japan's economic history even though it was overshadowed by the later Showa Financial Crisis of 1927 and the global Great Depression from 1929 onwards. Nonetheless, the First World War ultimately consummated the industrialisation of Japan and brought about a dual structure in the economy. This structure comprises two distinct groupings: On the one hand, there is a relatively small number of extremely large conglomerates called zaibatsu, such as Mitsubishi, Mitsui and Sumitomo, that had strong innovative potential and wielded influence on large parts of the Japanese economy via a network of contracts awarded to myriad smaller businesses. On the other hand there was a multitude of medium-sized and small companies that employed the vast majority of workers and-in increasing numbers-salary men.
Although to a lesser extent than the Japanese one, the Chinese economy nonetheless enjoyed a post-war period of booming demand-especially in the large port cities such as Shanghai. The strong slump in European exports due to the war also assisted individual parts of the light industry in securing higher sales on the large Chinese market for their home-produced products alongside US and Japanese products as well as aiding exports, for example of foodstuffs produced in China. The resulting profits were one factor that brought about the start of a "Golden Age of Chinese Bourgeoisie", as Marie-Claire Bergère called it. This economic boom imploded at least in some regions due to political instability after the war.