The Late Qing Dynasty and the Three Kingdoms + The Civil and Military Beiyang Era (2 Books)

I was making feverish preparations for war, the Russians were responding without a care in the world, and the people of the Great Qing had no idea which side to take... The Great Qing Empire, the Empire of Japan, and the Russian Empire: the “Three Kingdoms of the Late Qing,” gambling their nations’ fates. The Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), fought under Empress Dowager Cixi, Emperor Meiji, and the last tsar, was nothing short of a colossal wager on “World War Zero”!

Just six years after the war, the Qing Empire, which had stood for nearly three centuries, collapsed. Today, Chinese people who hear about Japanese military leaders may recognize names like Tojo Hideki, Yamamoto Isoroku, Okamura Yasuji, and Doihara Kenji, but may not know that these high-ranking Japanese Army and Navy officers of World War II all began their careers as junior officers during the Russo-Japanese War. Their shared “idol,” so to speak, was the Japanese general Oyama Iwao. The Russo-Japanese War: what historians call “World War Zero.”

The author of Three Kingdoms of the Late Qing visited Lushun twice and drove across Liaoning three times, retracing the Japanese Army’s route of advance, or, if you prefer, the Russian Army’s route of defeat. The wheels carried the author through Dandong, Fenghuangcheng, Xinbin, Benxi, Liaoyang, Shenyang, Tieling, Faku, and Changtu, stopping to investigate the relics of war at each site. In the spring, midsummer, and late autumn of 2015, the author also crossed over to Japan three times to explore firsthand the war’s birthplace and the environments that shaped a generation of military and political giants. On Russian Navy Day, held on the last Sunday of every July, the author made a special trip to Vladivostok, the famed city of the Far East, for a close-up look at the Pacific Fleet celebrations. Both the beginning and the end of the Russo-Japanese War were tied to this fleet. This is “history in the field”: visiting China and the great powers as they were a century ago and as they are today, and opening up history on the very spot where it happened! The term “World War Zero” is also based on a wartime record that remains unbroken to this day: neither side in the conflict was legally recognized as the victor or the defeated. The Russo-Japanese War of more than a century ago gave rise to the ideologies and political factions of the late Qing, accelerated the empire’s collapse, and profoundly reshaped the political landscape of China and East Asia, with effects that continue to this day.

Looking back on this period, Russia may have forgotten it, while Japan may have whitewashed it. This is a new book written by a Chinese author, seeking to reconstruct the political climate and global geopolitical order of the time.