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Updated: June 20, 2025
If we accept the naive suggestion of the Russian author, "Vladimir," the occupation of Kiao-chau by Germany "forced" Russia "to claim some equivalent compensation." Or possibly the cession of Port Arthur was another of the items in Li Hung Chang's bargain with Russia.
It is also worth noting that the first German troops were landed at Kiao-chau on November 17, 1897, while three Russian warships steamed into Port Arthur on December 18; and that the German "lease" was signed at Pekin on March 5, 1898; while that accorded to Russia bears date March 27 .
Those problems involved far mightier questions than the relations of Servia to Austria, the neutrality of Belgium or the wish of Japan to keep the peace of the East by seizing Kiao-Chau.
Germany followed this example, and, in avenging the murder of certain missionaries, took possession of the harbor of Kiao-Chau.
"I concluded from what the President said to me that he was disposed to accede to Japan's claims in regard to Kiao-Chau and Shantung. He also showed me a letter from to Makino saying he was sorry their claims had not been finally settled before the Session.
But many episodes, such as Kiao-Chau, and the Philippines, and the ceaseless warfare in the German colonies, and the restless enterprises of Pan-German intrigue, provided a commentary upon these pretensions which ought to have revealed the dangerous spirit which was conquering the German people.
There would have been one supreme world-power; and that a power whose attitude towards backward races has been illustrated by the ruthless massacre of the Hereros; whose attitude towards ancient but disorganised civilisations has been illustrated by the history of Kiao-chau and by the celebrated allocution of the Kaiser to his soldiers on the eve of the Boxer expedition, when he bade them outdo the ferocity of Attila and his Huns; whose attitude towards kindred civilisations on the same level as their own has been illustrated before the war in the treatment of Danes, Poles, and Alsatians, and during the war in the treatment of Belgium, of the occupied districts in France, of Poland and of Serbia.
Thus forestalled at Kiao-chau, Russia at once pushed through a 25-year lease of Port Arthur, and proceeded to strengthen it as a fortified port and naval base. England, though preoccupied with the Boer War, took Wei-hai-wai as a precautionary measure, "for as long a time as Port Arthur shall remain a possession of Russia."
In 1905, by the Treaty of Portsmouth, Japan succeeded to the Russian rights in southern Manchuria; in 1910 she annexed Korea; in 1911, during the Chinese Revolution, she stationed troops at Hankow and later constructed permanent barracks; in 1914, after the defeat of the Germans at Kiao-chau, she took over all the German interests in the Shantung peninsula; in 1915 she presented the Twenty-one Demands to China and coerced that power into granting most of them; and in 1918, in conjunction with the United States, Great Britain, and France, she landed a military force in the Maritime Province of Siberia for the definite purpose of rescuing the Czecho-Slovak troops who had made their way to that province and of guarding the military stores at Vladivostok.
The seizure of Kiao-chau in 1897-98 coincided with the appointment of Admiral von Tirpitz as Imperial Minister of Marine.
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