[Column] Bleak premonitions of a redo of the First Sino-Japanese Conflict

President Lee Jae Myung of South Korea shakes palms with President Xi Jinping of China throughout an MOU signing ceremony held on the Nice Corridor of the Folks in Beijing on Jan. 5, 2026. (Yonhap)

By Gil Yun-hyung, editorial author

The long-awaited confrontation between the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Mixed Fleet, led by Marshal-Admiral Sukeyuki Ito (1843-1914), and the Chinese language Beiyang Fleet befell a mere two days after the Battle of Pyongyang, on Sept. 17, 1894.
 
The Mixed Fleet, which departed its anchorage of Jangsan Cape in Hwanghae Province on Sept. 16, at 5 pm, proceeded towards Haiyang Island, positioned to the northwest. At 10:23 am, the fleet noticed black smoke billowing from an enemy vessel on the northeastern horizon.
 
Cognizant of one another’s presence, the 2 fleets entered a battle within the Yalu River estuary that might go down within the historical past of contemporary naval warfare. The fleet to emerge triumphant from this battle would safe management of the Yellow Sea and in the end the Korean Peninsula.
 
At roughly 12:50 pm, the flagship of the Beiyang Fleet, the Dingyuan, with a displacement tonnage of seven,337, charged towards the enemy, firing its first salvo from its 30.5 cm predominant weapons on the Yoshino, a Mixed Fleet vessel with a displacement tonnage of 4,216, that was positioned round 5,800 meters away. So began the Battle of the Yellow Sea.
 
Earlier than any photographs have been fired, many projected that the Beiyang Fleet, which possessed the Dingyuan and the Zhenyuan, thought of the most effective warships in Asia, would win. However actuality proved these theories false.
 
Ding Ruchang (1836-1895), a Chinese language commander who took his personal life the subsequent yr, selected to make the most of a line abreast formation, the place ships are organized aspect by aspect and cost the enemy concurrently, whereas the Mixed Fleet adopted a line forward formation, the place vessels are put in single file. The deciding issue that solidified who gained and misplaced was the pace of the ships.
 
Japan was set to win the battle when the vanguard squadron of 4 ships led by Kozo Tsuboi efficiently handed the Beiyang Fleet’s entrance at excessive pace and executed a pointy proper flip. Consequently, the cruisers on the far proper of the formation — the Yangwei and Chaoyong — have been scuttled after a mere half-hour, as a result of concentrated enemy fireplace. Having misplaced its fight functionality, the Beiyang Fleet withdrew to its naval base in Weihaiwei, Shandong Province.
 
How do the Chinese language bear in mind this fight? After visiting the location that was beforehand the naval base for the Beiyang Fleet on June 12, 2018, Chinese language President Xi Jinping commented, “The doorways to our hefty, heavy historical past have swung huge open to teach me of the warnings we will take from battle and varied different classes.” What does that remark imply?
 
In accordance with “The Politics of Xi Jinping,” written by Takashi Suzuki, a professor at Daito Bunka College, Xi gathered high-ranking officers on the rank of senior colonel and above in Could 2017 to say, “I’ve repeatedly referred to the First Sino-Japanese Conflict for example. The collapse of the Beiyang Fleet wrecked the gate defending our seas, permitting alien invaders to come back and go as they happy, in the end conquering and occupying our lands. The Treaty of Shimonoseki authorized Japan’s rule over Korea and ceded the Liaodong Peninsula, Taiwan and the Penghu Islands to Japan. It was from this cut-off date that the seeds of hassle over Taiwan have been sown. These historic occasions left deep, lasting wounds in our hearts.”
 
What worldwide order will China, which nonetheless cradles this historic trauma, pursue? Xi, who turned the chief of China in March 2013, has adhered to a singular nationwide aim: “the good rejuvenation of the Chinese language nation.” This nice rejuvenation in all probability entails bringing again the worldwide order of East Asia to the state it was in earlier than the Sino-Japanese Conflict.
 
If that’s to occur, China might want to full its aim of unification by absorbing Taiwan, and reincorporate your entire Korean Peninsula, which was its former vassal state, again into its sphere of affect.
 
That explains why Xi made the acute declare that “Korea was part of China,” in response to Donald Trump, throughout his first face-to-face assembly with the US president in April 2017, main Trump, who doubtless possessed little perception into East Asian historical past, to remark, “After listening [to Xi] for 10 minutes I spotted that [East Asian history] shouldn’t be really easy,” throughout an interview with The Wall Road Journal on April 12, 2017.
 
We can’t dismiss Xi’s name on Jan. 5 for South Korea to face “on the best aspect of historical past” as one thing trivial. If the US and China, now dubbed the G2, implement a grand cut price that divides the Pacific, the Chinese language folks’s ardour to beat historic trauma will conflict with the id of Koreans, who’ve carved out their lives as residents of a democratic nation. If Korea resists, we must endure humiliation worse than what Japan is experiencing.
 
President Lee Jae Myung’s visits to China and Japan achieved loads, however it appears clear that every one of East Asia is getting into an period of uncertainty that harkens again to the late nineteenth century. As for now, all I can say is that I’ve a bleak premonition of what might come.

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