The Kingmaker: Korea Between Asia’s Great Powers

When the Korean peninsula was arbitrarily divided at the 38th parallel in 1948, two antagonistic regimes were born: communists in the north and conservatives in the south, each with dreams of reunifying the peninsula under their rule, but without the means of achieving it on their own. Their diverging visions of what kind of modern nation Korea was to become made the possibility of conciliation and unity increasingly remote and led to war in June 1950.

The main issues over which the Korean War was fought had their origins in the immediate aftermath of Korea’s liberation from Japan in 1945. Yet the outbreak of the conflict was not simply the outcome of Great Power politics: opposing political groups in Korea had relied on foreign powers to help resolve domestic disputes. At the same time, foreign powers exploited Korean domestic divisions for their own imperialist aims.

This echoed the situation in the late 19th century when Korea found itself at the centre of a critical moment in international history. The three great regional powers – China, Japan and Russia – found themselves facing the problem of a non-power that happened to lie at the geographical, and thus the strategic, centre of the region: the Korean peninsula. Like the Great Game – the struggle between Russia and Britain over India that carried on for most of the 19th century – the ‘Other Great Game’ in East Asia, over control of the Korean peninsula, also gave rise to lasting rivalry and bloodshed among the regional powers. The chessboard on which this Korean Great Game was played caused two major wars: the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-95) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05). They would change East Asia forever. 

Korea’s kings

For the better part of the Chosŏn dynasty (1392-1910), Korea was an isolated society. Until 1637, Korea had mostly cut itself off from the world and seclusion became the cardinal principle of its foreign policy. However, after a series of calamitous foreign wars on the peninsula, in 1636 Manchu troops finally crossed the border into Korea. The Korean court capitulated and agreed to recognise the Manchu Qing dynasty as the rightful ruler of China.

Because of its military superiority and size, the Qing dynasty (1644-1912) established an extraordinarily stable diplomatic system that provided a way to regulate foreign relations within its own empire. With the exception of Korea’s independent relationship with Japan – which had withdrawn into its own policy of seclusion – Korea’s external contacts were maintained through China. Yet, beyond periodic Chinese diplomatic missions, most Koreans actually saw very little of their northern neighbour. Although Chinese envoys made reports to the Chinese emperor and, in times of crisis, transmitted advice to Korea, in practice the Qing envoys had little opportunity to intervene directly in Korean affairs.

This situation changed abruptly, however, in 1860. Following the conclusion of the Second Opium War (1856-60), Russia came into possession of a huge swathe of Chinese territory in the Ussuri and Amur region, bringing the Russians into direct contact with Koreans for the first time. This new border introduced a completely new dynamic into Korea’s relations with China. In the 1860s, several natural disasters struck the northeast province of Hamgyŏng-do. Already suffering from extreme poverty, local corruption and oppressive rule, Koreans began to emigrate to the new Russian territory in large numbers. Korean authorities complained loudly to the Qing to intervene on their behalf but, distracted by troubles at home, the Qing declared that the escape into Russian territory by Korean emigrants was not their concern.

Border security and emigration were just some of the many problems the Korean government was facing during this period of tremendous upheaval. In 1864, four years after the end of the Second Opium War, the Korean king Ch’ŏlchong died unexpectedly. As he had no heir, a distant relative was selected to succeed him. But as the new king, Kojong, was only 11 years old, his father, Yi Ha-ŭng, also known as the Taewŏn’gun, or ‘Grand Prince’, was put in charge until the young king came of age. This was a highly unusual arrangement. For the first time in its history, Korea essentially had two kings: a king whose father was living, and was also his regent.

French triumph

Upon his ascension as regent the Taewŏn’gun faced the immediate problem of Russia. What he feared most was that the hundreds of Koreans who had crossed into the new Russian territory might conspire with the Russians against the Korean government.

But there was also another urgent issue: the spread of Catholicism. Catholicism had made its way into Korea via China through the teaching of Jesuit priests as early as the 18th century. Since then Catholic converts had been intermittently purged or tolerated depending on the Korean court’s vagaries. Sensing an opportunity with the Taewŏn’gun, two Korean Catholics, Nam Chong-sam and Kim Myŏng-ho, secretly approached him with a solution to the Russian border problem. They proposed that if Korea forged an alliance with France, with French missionaries acting as intermediaries, they would be able to ward off the looming Russian threat. In exchange, the Korean Catholics requested complete freedom of religion in Korea and the right to proselytise.

It was a bold plan. The French missionary Bishop Siméon François Berneux, who had come to Seoul in May 1856 to lead the underground Korean diocese, observed happily that the Taewŏn’gun ‘was hostile neither to the Catholic faith, which he knows is good, nor missionaries with whom he got on well’. It was widely known among religious circles in Korea that the Taewŏn’gun’s wife had for a long time been receiving instruction and advice from Berneux.

But the plan backfired when the anti-Catholic party in the Korean court got wind of it. Caught off-guard, the Taewŏn’gun suddenly reversed his position and, betraying his earlier promise, executed seven French Catholic missionaries and a number of Korean converts. When news of the executions reached the French chargé d’affaires in Beijing, Henri de Bellonet, he ordered that a punitive mission be sent to Korea. This mission amounted to about 600 men and was swiftly defeated. The result was that, instead of forcing the Korean government to acknowledge the realities of their changing world, their so-called ‘triumph’ over France hardened their resolve to keep the world at bay.

This resolve meant that when Japan sought to establish new relations with the Korean government following the Meiji Restoration in 1868, its envoys were rudely rebuffed. The Koreans belittled the appearance of the Japanese, criticising their hairstyles and Western clothes, and disparaged Japan as a ‘country without laws’. Meiji officials were outraged, and Japan threatened war.

In response, a ‘peace party’ took control of the Korean government and drove the Taewŏn’gun from power. Kojong, now 21 years old, assumed direct rule and reversed his father’s isolationist foreign policy; treaties with Japan and the United States soon followed.

But this created a fierce backlash among the more conservative elements of Korean society. Angered and frightened by the momentous changes happening around them, Korea’s conservative Confucian literati now called upon the Taewŏn’gun to overthrow his son, the king, and the party that put him into power. In July 1882, a minor dispute erupted into a military revolt, the Imo Uprising. The uprising was due to a dispute over soldiers’ pay and rising tensions between members of the old Korean army units and a newly established elite unit, equipped and trained by the Japanese, that essentially served as Kojong’s Praetorian Guard. The rebels destroyed the Japanese legation and invaded the king’s palace. At their behest, the Taewŏn’gun removed Kojong and declared himself regent again. 

War on the peninsula

This violence had ramifications for both China and Japan. China responded by sending troops to kidnap the Taewŏn’gun and put Kojong back in power. An agreement was also worked out between China and Japan allowing Japan to station troops in Korea to guard the Japanese legation. This was a significant departure in China’s tradition of non-interference and brought about a complete transformation in its relationship with Korea. The 1882 incident also led to the dispatch of Japanese troops to the peninsula for the first time since the late 16th century. All this was caused not by any specific design by China or Japan, but by the chaotic domestic situation on the Korean peninsula.

China’s tightening authority over the peninsula also created new political divisions within Korea. Frustrated by Chinese overlordship, a new faction of radical young progressive leaders, allied with Meiji Japan, sprang up to challenge the Chinese-backed Korean government in 1884. Another confrontation between China and Japan came to a head in Korea. Once again, China responded with overwhelming force, put down the Korean rebels and forced Japan to back down. The Tianjin Convention, signed in April 1885, temporarily settled the conflict when both China and Japan agreed to remove troops from the peninsula and to inform the other if they deployed forces to Korea in the future.

Japan now seemed content to leave Korea to China – as long as China prevented other Western powers, namely Russia, from getting a foothold on the peninsula. By the 1890s, however, a change in Russia’s Far Eastern policy once again altered Japan’s calculations. Having secured control of the Central Asian khanates of Khiva, Bukhara and Kokand, Russian attention shifted to East Asia and the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway.

This, then, was the international context behind Japan’s stand-off with China over Korea during the spring of 1894. A peasant uprising in southern Korea led by rebels against the government prompted Kojong to ask China for aid. In accordance with the Tianjin Convention, China informed Japan, which sent its own troops. But the two could not co-operate and soon China and Japan were engulfed in war in Korea. While the Japanese leadership’s stated goal for the war was the restoration of order and reform of Korea, their unstated, true, goals concerned the changing balance of power in Asia and the underlying fear that, if Japan did not act, Russia would take advantage of the chaos in Korea to assert its power over the peninsula.

The First Sino-Japanese War exacted a heavy toll on Korea. The anti-government rebels took advantage of the war to launch a second rebellion against local Korean and Japanese officials in autumn 1894. Unable to quash them, Kojong called on Japanese forces for help. According to the Confucian chronicler Hwang Hyŏn, local Korean officials ‘begged for the stationing of Japanese and Korean troops in their own districts’ to help maintain order. That winter, combined Japanese and Korean government forces conducted a scorched-earth pacification campaign to devastating effect. Anyone suspected of collaborating with the rebels was rounded up and executed. Whole towns and villages were destroyed. Estimates of the death toll vary, but some scholars have put the number between 40,000 to 50,000 Korean deaths compared to 20,000 Japanese and 30,000 Chinese. It is possible that more Koreans died during the Sino-Japanese War than Japanese and Chinese forces combined. 

Enter Russia

The Sino-Japanese War also served as a turning point in Russo-Japanese relations. It ended with a Japanese victory in 1895. The Treaty of Shimonoseki, signed that April, forced China to cede Korea to Japan. But just six days after Japan’s victory, ministers from Russia, Germany and France called on Japanese leaders to give up the Liaodong peninsula in northeast China and its strategically important harbour of Port Arthur – the so-called ‘Triple Intervention’. For its part in the intervention, Russia hoped that a grateful China would listen sympathetically to its appeals to build the Trans-Siberian railway through Manchuria. The war had ended but Japan now faced a new and more formidable enemy: Russia.

Sensing Japanese weakness, Kojong’s wife, Queen Min, sought out Russia’s help to thwart Japanese influence in the peninsula. Her plan failed. Fearful of Russian ascendency in Korea, the Japanese general Miura Gorō came up with a plan to assassinate the queen and put the Taewŏn’gun back in power. By the time Queen Min’s bloodied body was burned, at 6am on 8 October 1895, the Taewŏn’gun had arrived at the main gate of Kyŏngbok Palace to resume his role as regent. It was the fourth time that the reins of power had changed hands between father and son.

As the Korean monarchy hurled from one crisis to another, a desperate Kojong sought refuge in the Russian legation, hosted by the Russian minister Karl Weber. With Weber’s assistance, Kojong retook power, punished the pro-Japanese officials who had been involved in Queen Min’s murder, and appointed a new pro-Russian cabinet. Russia’s position in Korea and Manchuria now seemed unassailable. Without a shot being fired, Russia had pulled off a spectacular diplomatic feat by reaping all the benefits of Japan’s victory over China for itself. As for the Taewŏn’gun, his life was spared. He died shortly after, in 1898.

‘Playing our game’

Japan was not alone in fearing Russia. The British were also growing increasingly anxious over Russian incursions into Manchuria. With much of its military force occupied by the Boer War (1899-1902), the British government was forced to lean on the Japanese. Encouraged to send troops to China, Japan took another big step in joining the ranks of the Western imperialist nations as an equal power.

Meanwhile, US president Theodore Roosevelt believed that a rising Japan could be incorporated into a coalition of modern maritime states whose main task would be to defend the principles of the Open Door in Asia that would preserve commercial opportunity in China. The Japanese, Roosevelt declared, ‘were playing our game’. Along with British backing, Japan could count on US support in its confrontation with Russia over Korea.

The Japanese were grateful for British and American support. In 1899, the anti-foreign Boxer Uprising in northern China had brought the Korea question into renewed focus for Japan. After suppressing the Boxers, Russian troops refused to withdraw from Manchuria, posing a direct threat to Japan’s interests in Korea. When the Japanese received reports that a large number of Russian soldiers disguised as labourers had occupied a Korean village on the southern bank of the Yalu River in 1903, the reaction was swift. Without a declaration of war, Japan made a surprise attack on Port Arthur on 8-9 February 1904 and, nearly simultaneously, landed troops in the Korean port of Inch’ŏn. For the second time in less than a decade, Japan was waging war in Korea. 

As in the Sino-Japanese War, Koreans took sides. As many as 260,000 Koreans mobilised themselves on behalf of the Japanese against Russia, either to work on the railways, transport military goods, or as spies. These efforts were made through a new reformist organisation called the Ilchinhoe, who hoped that, by helping Japan in its war effort against Russia, Korea would share in the spoils of Japan’s victory. Few, if any, saw the contradiction between their progressive domestic goals and collaboration with the Japanese.

Other elements of Korean society staunchly opposed co-operation with Japan. As strong proponents of preserving Korea’s traditional Confucian ways and customs, these local conservative groups were also fiercely loyal to the Korean monarchy. Kojong naturally supported this conservative constituency while clandestinely co-operating with the Russians by supplying them with information on Japanese troop movements. Like previous domestic upheavals, the Russo-Japanese War further deepened the political divisions within Korean society that would resurface again in colonial and post-liberation Korea.

Game over

The Russo-Japanese War was brought to an end with the signing of the Portsmouth Treaty on 5 September 1905. The Japan-Korea Treaty, which was signed two months later, signalled the end of the ‘Other Great Game’ and brought about a settlement of the ‘Korea problem’ in Japan’s favour. Korea became a protectorate of Japan. Over the course of the 45 years in which the game was played, East Asia was completely restructured in a manner that has important ramifications for the region to this day.

First and foremost, the Qing’s rapid decline was set in motion after Korea became an object of regional competition. Russia’s eastward expansion in the 1860s and its new border with Korea had set in motion a series of events that fractured the previous regional harmony. What followed after the Sino-Japanese War was the swift and steady crumbling of its empire and the complete collapse of China as the original guarantor of the East Asian order.

China’s tortuous developmental story is one long quest for territorial recovery and national unity. Beijing’s desire to reclaim all territories it regards as its historical possession is in part an effort to efface this national humiliation and restore China to its former position in the East Asian order.

Meanwhile, the instability created by the chaotic domestic situation on the Korean peninsula led to a complete reversal in the Asian balance of power in Japan’s favour. But, instead of resolving the problem of Korean instability, the Japanese created an even greater challenge for the region: an increasingly unstable China.

Geography blessed Japan with the opportunity to pursue a maritime route to power, but domestic upheavals in Korea, China and, later, in Russia led Japan to take the continental route to power, with devastating consequences. The Bolshevik revolution in November 1917 led the Entente powers to send troops to Siberia to support the anti-Bolshevik ‘White’ Russian Army. Japan joined this expedition in 1918 with more than 70,000 soldiers and briefly explored the idea of creating a dependent Siberian province. Although Japanese troops withdrew from Siberia in 1922, the issue of how Japan would deal with the threats in Asia would not be fully resolved until the Second World War.

As for Russia, although it suffered its share of setbacks, unlike China it did not lose any territory but added a great new swathe of land that pushed its border to the Pacific. After 1922, the Bolsheviks gained influence and power in East Asia. The Soviets continued to expand their influence in East Asia after the Second World War, recovering the rights that Russia had lost in the Russo-Japanese War. We should not be surprised that Russia touts itself as a Eurasian rather than European power. As Fyodor Dostoevsky put it in 1881: ‘In Europe we are canaille, but in Asia we are a great power.’

Keeping Korea

Finally, the ‘Other Great Game’ raises the question of what this history can tell us about the present and future of the Korean peninsula. As Korea was thrown from one crisis to another, the big question of its survival became how Korea’s independence – its ‘Koreanness’ – might be preserved. That question determined everything, from resistance struggles against Japan, to varieties of accommodation and collaboration with Tokyo. On one side of the division were those who saw the path to Korea’s survival, strength and prosperity in the wholesale embrace of Japan’s and the West’s ‘modern’ values accompanied by a repudiation of Korea’s Neo-Confucian past and monarchical institutions. On the other side were those who believed that the purity of the nation must be protected from external ‘contamination’. Vladimir Lenin’s advocacy of national self-determination and anti-colonial revolution inspired a variety of Korean leaders, many of them reformed Confucians, who were committed to the defence of Korea from both Japan and the West.

‘Who speaks for the nation’ thus became a politically fraught question. But the important point was not that Korea contained these lines of division, but that those divisions were soon separated and aggregated into two different geopolitical entities: North and South. The division of the peninsula is deeply rooted in old debates over Korea’s place in the world as well as issues related to national pride and identity that go back to the 19th century. The great power rivalries over the peninsula endowed Korea’s domestic struggles with international significance. What happened on the peninsula led to the rise and fall of Great Powers. 

Sheila Miyoshi Jager is Professor of East Asian History at Oberlin College, Ohio, and the author of The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia (Belknap Press, 2023).