The Treaty of Shimonoseki

In the war the Qing army kept losing ground, and the Qing was forced to sue for peace. In spring 1895 it sent Li Hongzhang as plenipotentiary to Shimonoseki, Japan, to negotiate with Prime Minister Ito Hirobumi and Foreign Minister Mutsu Munemitsu. During the talks Li was shot and wounded by a Japanese ruffian. On 17 April 1895 the Treaty of Shimonoseki was signed. It provided that China recognize Korea’s “independence,” in effect making it a Japanese dependency; cede the Liaodong Peninsula, all of Taiwan with its affiliated islands, and the Penghu Islands to Japan; pay Japan an indemnity of 200 million taels of silver; open Shashi, Chongqing, Suzhou and Hangzhou as trading ports; and allow Japan to open factories at China’s treaty ports, with their goods shipped inland free of internal taxes. It was the most serious unequal treaty since the Treaty of Nanjing and greatly deepened China’s semi-colonization: ceding Taiwan and other places severely damaged territorial sovereignty; the huge indemnity, about three years of Qing revenue, forced heavy foreign borrowing and gave the powers control of China’s finances; treaty ports reached the middle and upper Yangtze; and allowing Japanese factories met the powers’ need to export capital and seriously hindered the development of Chinese national capitalism. After it was signed, Russia, Germany and France intervened for their own interests and forced Japan to give up the Liaodong Peninsula, while Japan extorted 30 million taels of silver from China as a “redemption fee,” known as the Triple Intervention. The treaty greatly deepened the national crisis, and the powers launched a frenzy of carving up China.