청일전쟁기 이토 히로부미(伊藤博文) 내각의 조선(朝鮮)에 대한 군사·외교정책

Japanese military policy toward Korea during sino-japanese war

The First Sino-Japanese War (1 August 1894 – 17 April 1895) was fought between the Qing Dynasty China and Meiji Japan, primarily over control of Korea. After more than six months of continuous successes by Japanese army and naval forces and the loss of the Chinese port of Weihaiwei, the Qing leadership sued for peace in February 1895. Direct results of the war showed that the military strength and sovereignty of the Qing Dynasty had been severely weakened during the nineteenth century, especially by the Opium Wars; and it demonstrated that forced reform had modernized Japan significantly since the Meiji Restoration in 1867, especially as compared with the Self-Strengthening Movement in China. Regional dominance in East Asia shifted from China to Japan; and the Qing Dynasty, along with the classical tradition in China, suffered a major blow. These trends would later manifest in the 1911 Revolution. During Itō’s second term as prime minister (August 8, 1892 – August 31, 1896), he supported the First Sino-Japanese War and negotiated the Treaty of Shimonoseki in March 1895 with his ailing foreign minister Mutsu Munemitsu. In the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of Commerce and Navigation of 1894, he succeeded in removing some of the onerous unequal treaty clauses that had plagued Japanese foreign relations since the start of the Meiji period.