Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895: Perceptions, Power and Primacy Book

Rare overview of this pivotal moment in modern history. Paine is especially good on the historical background to the war, and the diplomatic chess match over Korea that drew China in to it.

The section on the war itself is not quite up to the level of what comes before - as others have mentioned, it focuses a great deal on contemporary newspaper coverage (largely European, with Asian-based British papers being the best informed) which often means that after a paragraph summarizing certain events, a few paragraphs often follow quoting what was said in the press of the day. One cannot exactly fault the author for this, as she explicitly aims to "examine the war through the eyes of the journalists who filed reports...to show how the war changed outside perceptions of the relative power of China and Japan", however these excerpts do not add much to the play-by-play and can be quite repetitive, and might have been better organized in to a chapter of their own.

After previously making many perceptive points regarding inter-cultural bases of political misunderstandings between China, Japan, and the Western nations (mainly British, French and Russian), the final chapter 'The Cultural Dimensions of the Sino-Japanese War' does not quite follow through. Her analyses of the respective cultures of China, Japan and Europe are maybe a little too simplistic and essentialist, perhaps inevitable though when trying to deal with this topic in the space of a single chapter.

An exception I would take with Paine would be over one aspect of her writing regarding the importance of 'face' in the diplomatic dealings of the Sino-Japanese War, and the part it plays in explaining many of the diplomatic and political moves made by certain Asian countries. While it is true that Western countries have often been entirely oblivious as to the subtext of certain Asian actions, have made and still make blunders in etiquette, I would argue this is not because in China and Japan "the concept of 'face' played a critical role in human relations" while in Western nations such things would be "considered to be superficial issues". Rather, it is that 'face' depends on implicit communication, and if the contextual playing field is not the same or is unknown, the required inferences cannot be drawn.

Paine highlights the tug-of-war between Japan and China over the equivalent ranking of officials in each negotiation party as quintessentially about 'face'. Western nations too have engaged in similar wrangling over protocol over the centuries, with similar intentions to weaken the bargaining or reputational position of an adversary. Personally, I have come across 'face' used as a concept by people who have no notion that it is Chinese in origin, to describe events in their own lives - just because a culture doesn't have a specific word for something, it doesn't mean the idea doesn't exist. While the degree to which 'face' matters may indeed be different to different people (surely an overlap with implicit and explicit cultures in general), I do not agree that it is a purely Chinese/Japanese concept that has no corollaries in the wider world, just that what counts towards it is different in different countries.