the main railway through Manchuria, with adjoining territory. Thus
Manchuria became Japan's sphere of influence and was lost to the Manchus
without their being consulted in any way. The Japanese penetration of
Manchuria then proceeded stage by stage, not without occasional
setbacks, until she had occupied the whole of Manchuria from 1932 to
1945. After the end of the second world war, Manchuria was returned to
China, with certain reservations in favour of the Soviet Union, which
were later revoked.

11 _Reform and reaction: the Boxer Rising_

China had lost the war with Japan because she was entirely without
modern armament. While Japan went to work at once with all her energy to
emulate Western industrialization, the ruling class in China had shown a
marked repugnance to any modernization; and the centre of this
conservatism was the dowager empress Tz[)u] Hsi. She was a woman of
strong personality, but too uneducated--in the modern sense--to be able
to realize that modernization was an absolute necessity for China if it
was to remain an independent state. The empress failed to realize that
the Europeans were fundamentally different from the neighbouring tribes
or the pirates of the past; she had not the capacity to acquire a
general grasp of the realities of world politics. She felt instinctively
that Europeanization would wreck the foundations of the power of the
Manchus and the gentry, and would bring another class, the middle class
and the merchants, into power.

There were reasonable men, however, who had seen the necessity of
reform--especially Li Hung-chang, who has already been mentioned. In
1896 he went on a mission to Moscow, and then toured Europe. The
reformers were, however, divided into two groups. One group advocated
the acquisition of a certain amount of technical knowledge from abroad
and its introduction by slow reforms, without altering the social
structure of the state or the composition of the government. The others
held that the state needed fundamental changes, and that superficial
loans from Europe were not enough. The failure in the war with Japan
made the general desire for reform more and more insistent not only in
the country but in Peking. Until now Japan had been despised as a
barbarian state; now Japan had won! The Europeans had been despised; now
they were all cutting bits out of China for themselves, extracting from
the government one privilege after another, and quite openly dividing