In 1894, the Sino-Japanese Sino-Japanese War broke out, in which the decadent and decadent Qing Dynasty was defeated by the emerging Japan: not only lost the vassal state of Korea, but also Liaodong, Shandong and other places were also poisoned by the Japanese army. Frightened by the Japanese soldiers, the Qing government appointed de Cuilin, a German who was then the TaxAtion Department of Tianjin, as its representative to Japan to discuss the terms of peace, but the Japanese side refused to negotiate with De Cuilin and asked the Qing government to send "plenipotentiary members with formal qualifications." The Qing government, believing that the Japanese side had refused to negotiate with de Chuanglin because of her German status, appointed Zhang Yinhuan, a household attendant, and Shao Youlian, the governor of Hunan, as ministers plenipotentiary to Japan to seek peace.
However, at this time, the Japanese army was storming Weihaiwei, and the military victory made the Japanese believe that this was not the best time for peace talks, so they refused on the grounds that they questioned whether the envoys were not qualified for full appointment. In February 1895, the Qing court sent his retainer Li Hongzhang from Tianjin and arrived by ship in Maguan, Japan (present-day Shimonoseki City, Honyamaguchi Prefecture) to negotiate with Japanese Prime Minister Hirobumi Ito and Foreign Minister Mutsu Munemitsu. On March 19, 1895, Li Hongzhang arrived in Maguan, where he held three meetings with Japanese Prime Minister Hirobumi Ito and Foreign Minister Mutsu Munemitsu at Chunfan Building until the 24th. At this time, Li Hongzhang did not know that as early as the Nagasaki Incident in 1886, the Beiyang Navy had lost the secret code.
More than a month before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, Japanese Foreign Minister Mutsu Muneko submitted a note in Chinese to Wang Fengzao, minister of the Qing government in Japan, and the next day Wang Fengzao sent a telegram to Prime Minister Yamen. The Japanese side successfully intercepted the telegram, and from then until the declaration of war, the Japanese side deciphered at least 58 secret chinese telegrams, thus allowing them to understand a series of Chinese military and diplomatic layouts in advance. Until the end of the Sino-Japanese War, the Qing government still knew nothing about this, so when Li Hongzhang went to Maguan to negotiate, the telegram sent back to China still used a code that had been deciphered by the Japanese side, so the Japanese side actually knew the bottom line of the Chinese side' negotiations.
Diplomatic negotiations are, to a considerable extent, an information war. At this time, Japan had already taken the military initiative and was well aware of the bottom line of China's negotiations, so there was actually nothing to talk about in the Maguan negotiations. At this time, Ito Hirobumi, Mutsu Munemitsu and others were just one by one: during the day, they sat at the negotiating table with Li Hongzhang and pretended to talk, but in fact, they had already known all the Chinese countermeasures the night before, and to put it bluntly, they were just fake models and fake plays. Although Li Hongzhang had expected that the Japanese side's negotiating conditions would be harsh before going to Japan for negotiations, he was shocked by the harshness of the Japanese side when he saw the Japanese negotiating conditions.
The conditions set by the Japanese side are as follows: China recognizes korea as an independent and self-reliant country; China must cede to Japan Taiwan Island, the Penghu Archipelago and its affiliated islands, the Liaodong Peninsula, and other places; China compensates Japan for its military expenses of 300 million yuan; China opens seven places in Beijing, Shashi, Chongqing, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Xiangtan, and Wuzhou as treaty ports; Japan will obtain the right to navigation of China's inland rivers such as the Yangtze River, Xijiang, Wusong River, and canal; and before the peace treaty is formally signed, China needs to hand over Dagu, Tianjin, and Shanhaiguan to Japan for occupation. The railway line from Tianjin to Shanhaiguan was also under the jurisdiction of the Japanese army, and the cost of the Japanese garrison in the above areas was borne by the Chinese side.
The outbreak of the Sino-Japanese Sino-Japanese War was to a considerable extent triggered by North Korea. In fact, with the invasion of the Western powers, the tributary system of the East Asian clans with China as the core in history was completely broken, and by the eve of the Sino-Japanese War, the Qing government had only korea, the only vassal state, but this was more just for the need to maintain face. Before Li Hongzhang went to Japan for negotiations, he had expected that the Japanese side would demand that the Chinese side abandon its clan relations with Korea, and the Qing government was actually ready to accept this. The main conditions that really made it difficult for the Qing government to accept were the three conditions of land cession, indemnity, and garrison, especially the most sensitive one of allowing Japan to garrison troops in Dagu, Tianjin, Shanhaiguan, and other places.
Once the Japanese army stationed in these places, it meant that the Beijing Division would be directly under the threat of the Japanese army, and the lives of the royal family, the dignitaries and nobles, and the sons of the Eight Banners would be in the hands of others. Faced with such conditions, Li Hongzhang demanded an extension of the negotiations on the grounds that he wanted to ask the Beijing imperial court for instructions. Judging from Li Hongzhang's consistent diplomatic means, he has always lacked the spirit of independence and self-determination of resistance, and more often he has taken advantage of the contradictions between the great powers to achieve the goal of using the enemy to suppress the destruction, so as to strive for less land and less compensation. In this Maguan negotiation, Li Hongzhang repeated the same trick - he did not explicitly reject the Japanese conditions, but adopted delaying tactics.
China is like a piece of fat in the eyes of the great powers, and Japan's ambition to monopolize China will inevitably lead to contradictions with other powers. In fact, Li Hongzhang hoped to use this delayed period to make public Japan's ambition to monopolize China. Japanese Foreign Minister Mutsu Zongguang saw Very clearly that Li Hongzhang was careful about this, so in the third round of talks on the 24th, he asked Li Hongzhang to give a clear answer to the Japanese side's conditions, and Li Hongzhang said that he had received instructions from Beijing to explicitly reject the Japanese demand. After the talks ended at 4:15 p.m. on the same day, Li Hongzhang returned to his residence from the Chunfan Building where the talks were held in a palanquin.
At about 4:30 a.m., Li Hongzhang and his party passed by the Waihama Town Post and Telecommunications Office to the Gangmura Grocery Store, turned north and walked about 50 meters to Li Hongzhang's residence in Japan, Ingji Temple. As they reached the corner of the street, a man suddenly burst out of the crowd of onlookers vying for China's minister plenipotentiary and fired a shot into the palanquin, and Li Hongzhang was shot under his left eye, the bullet embedded in the cheekbone. For a while, the crowd of onlookers was suddenly in chaos, and the entourage hurriedly sent Li Hongzhang to the hospital for treatment, and the assassin was arrested by the Japanese police on the spot. Itō Hirobumi, who learned of the news, was furious and scolded: "I would rather be the one who was shot," and then Ito Hirobumi, Mutsu Munemitsu and other Japanese government dignitaries went to the hospital to visit Li Hongzhang.
Japan, which had been negotiating on the one hand but not on the other, had agreed to suspend military action during the follow-up negotiations. However, japanese politicians once again showed their cunning in the suspension of military operations: the scope of the truce only involved Liaodong and Shandong, and did not include Taiwan, Penghu and other places, because Japan had regarded these areas as its own pockets. On April 1, Li Hongzhang saw a new negotiating plan offered by Mu ao Zongguang: recognizing North Korea's independence; ceding Taiwan Island, the Penghu Islands and its affiliated islands, the Liaodong Peninsula, and other places; paying indemnities of 300 million taels of silver; and opening Shashi, Chongqing, Hangzhou, and Suzhou as treaty ports.
Except for the deletion of the provisions on the japanese garrison in the original plan and the reduction in the number of treaty ports, the Japanese side agreed to reduce the amount of reparations from 300 million taels to 200 million taels after some bargaining. The impact of Li Hongzhang's assassination on the Treaty of Maguan was actually two main: Japan gave up the privilege of stationing troops in China; Japan reduced its reparations of 100 million taels of silver. So why did the Japanese side, which was tough at the beginning, abandon these two articles after Li Hongzhang's assassination? Of course, Japan did not do this because it was afraid of Li Hongzhang, nor because it was afraid of the corrupt and incompetent Qing government, but in fact Japan had other worries.
In fact, there was precedent for similar cases: Crown Prince Nikolai of Russia, who was visiting Japan in May 1891, was stabbed by the Japanese policeman Tsuda Mizo, who was in charge of his security work. Afterwards, a large number of Japanese people went to shrines, temples and churches to pray for the crown prince's recovery, more than 10,000 condolence telegrams from all over Japan, and Emperor Meiji personally boarded a Russian warship moored in the port of Kobe to visit Crown Prince Nikolai. To apologize, Kanayama Village in Yamagata Prefecture prohibits the use of the surname "Tsuda" and the name "Sanzang". On May 20, a girl named "Isamu Hatayama" even apologized for stabbing herself in the throat with a razor in front of the Kyoto Prefectural Government Office, and was called "the martyr of Hotaru" in Japanese society.
At that time, Japan did this out of fear of Russia's powerful military strength, so when faced with the assassination of Li Hongzhang, would the Japanese have a fear of China that was weak in their eyes? The answer is yes – although almost any specific battle in the Sino-Japanese War ended in the victory of the Japanese army, it was obviously impractical to conquer the great China with Japan's national strength. Even Japan, which was later one of the world's great powers, launched a fourteen-year war of aggression against China, which did not force the Chinese people to submit, and the gap in strength between China and Japan during the Sino-Japanese War was not as large as it was during the fourteen-year War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, and even before the war, Japan itself had no certainty of victory.
Of course, Japan would not be afraid of the decadent And fallen Qing government, but at this time Japan was not arrogant enough to think that it had the strength to annex all of China, as it later did, and if Japan took too many benefits in China, it would inevitably lead to conflicts with other powers. Although all countries in the world follow the basic principle of maximizing their own interests when participating in international politics, it has always been a tried and tested diplomatic means for big countries and powerful countries to achieve their strategic goals in the name of helping the weak and small. The assassination of Li Hongzhang put Japan in a rather passive position in international diplomacy, because at this time the great powers were already wary of Japan's ambitions, which meant that the great powers could completely intervene in the Sino-Japanese war under the banner of safeguarding China's sovereignty.
Moreover, Li Hongzhang has handled foreign affairs for many years and has many personal relations with high-level political leaders of Western powers; diplomatic negotiations were originally a matter between the two countries, and these Western political leaders were not convenient to interject, but now even the most basic personal safety of negotiating envoys has been threatened, which provides an excellent excuse for the Western powers to interfere. In particular, Tsarist Russia, which also harbored ambitions in northeast China, had long been trying to expand its power in northeast China by mediating in the Sino-Japanese war, so when Tsarist Russia learned of The assassination of Li Hongzhang, it immediately linked this matter to the Otsu incident in which Crown Prince Nicholas was assassinated, and attacked Japan internationally, so that Japan faced severe diplomatic pressure.
What Ito Hirobumi and others are most afraid of is that Li Hongzhang will return to China on the pretext of his reasons, and the great powers will take the opportunity to intervene in it. If the situation continues in this situation, it will affect the victories that Japan has won in the war. Ito Hirobumi and other decision-makers in the Japanese government saw this very clearly, but at that time, many radical groups emerged in Japan that wanted to take advantage of the victory over the annexation of China. In fact, this is beyond the scope of Japan's national strength, and the Japanese top level cannot but worry that if the Maguan negotiations are interrupted due to the assassination of Li Hongzhang, it will cause them to lose the benefits that they have seen at their fingertips for a moment. In order to avoid such a situation, the Japanese side has launched diplomatic public relations with treatment, condolences, and punishment as the main content.
Mutsu Munemitsu invited Ishiguro Tadao, the army field health chief, and Sato Jin, director of the Hiroshima Army Reserve Hospital, to treat Li Hongzhang's wounds. Both were famous doctors in Japan at the time for the treatment of surgical gunshot wounds: Sato Shinpai once amputated Okuma Shigenobu after his assassination. After the two arrived, they even respectfully said: "I will take it seriously as if my father was wounded by a gunshot." Of course, Li Hongzhang also arranged doctors in the mission to Japan to negotiate, not because he predicted in advance that an assassination would occur, but because he would be able to get medical treatment in time when the members of the mission fell ill. Ishiguro and Sato demanded a full takeover of the treatment on the grounds that the accompanying doctors of the Chinese mission did not specialize in treating surgical gunshot wounds.
This reason seems to be reasonable, but behind this reason is actually hidden the careful thinking of the Japanese side that is not humane. Afterwards, Ishiguro clearly wrote in his memoirs: The Japanese side believes that the doctor of Li Hongzhang's mission must not be allowed to show his face. Because Japan urgently needs to send a friendly signal to the international community through the treatment of Li Hongzhang. From the beginning, Ishiguro and Sato were instructed to exclude Chinese doctors from treatment. During the treatment, the Japanese emperor specially sent a special envoy to comfort him, the Japanese empress also personally made bandages for Li Hongzhang, and also sent two nurses to serve closely, and people from all walks of life in Japan also sent condolence letters and telegrams.
The murderer of Li Hongzhang, Toyotaro Koyama, was caught by the police on the spot. Toyotaro Koyama, who was 27 years old at the time, was an idle unemployed vagrant. Toyotaro Koyama, who dropped out of secondary school after only a few months of high school, later enrolled in Keio School, but quit not long after. Later, a self-styled "hero", he worked hard for the Liberal Party's election campaign, but was actually used as a horseman for some political groups, and was arrested and imprisoned twice for fighting. At the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War, Toyotaro Oyama was so excited that he could not sleep, and he became more and more excited as the war continued to advance in Favor of Japan.
However, as The Japanese Prime Minister, Ito Hirobumi was well aware that Japan had not completely annexed China, so he strongly advocated taking advantage of the victory of the armistice and negotiating peace. Ito Hirobumi tried to negotiate peace and negotiate with the Chinese side to pay compensation for the cession of land and open a port, but Koyama Toyotaro did not agree with this. Toyotaro Oyama believed that since the war situation was favorable to Japan, it was necessary to take advantage of the victory and completely occupy China. As a result, Koyama Hatsutaro hated Ito Hirobumi, who advocated armistice and peace, and gave Ito Hirobumi the nickname Old Baboon. After all, the decision-making power of the Japanese government was in the hands of the "old baboon" that Oyama Said was called, so the Japanese government finally launched the Maguan negotiations with the Qing government.
Koyama Wasotaro was powerless to stop the negotiations from unfolding, but he was determined to use his own strength to stir up the negotiations. Koyama's chosen method of stirring up negotiations was to assassinate Li Hongzhang, the Qing minister plenipotentiary: he bought a five-shot pistol in Yokohama and carried a poetry book and a photograph of Li Hongzhang in his arms. He believes that there is probably no return from this trip, so he deliberately returned to his hometown before the action. He worshipped his deceased mother in his hometown and said goodbye to his father and sister. When his sister sent him away, it snowed heavily, and What rose in Koyama's heart was not sadness, but the tragedy of an "assassin". This militant demon has always considered himself a hero deep down.
Toyotaro Koyama also felt some fear in the face of the unknown outcome. At this time, what he used to encourage himself was what the Chinese Mencius said: "Why should there be profit, but also benevolence and righteousness." I don't know how he linked the occupation of the territory of other countries and the assassination of their envoys to benevolence. Ironically, there were many radicals in Japan at that time, such as Toyotaro Koyama, who were deeply influenced by Chinese culture, dreaming of annexing China. In order to dilute the fear in his heart, and in order not to leave regrets in his life, Koyama Toyotaro also deliberately went to the wind and cloud place to find a girl to enjoy before the action.
Koyama's assassination was not directed by anyone, and it was entirely due to his own fanatical militaristic sentiments. After Koyama's arrest, the police found a "suicide book" from him. The "Letter of Murder" spells out Koyama's motives for the assassination: he believes that simply killing Li Hongzhang will sabotage the Maguan negotiations, and then the Japanese army can break all the way into the city of Beijing. In fact, this was not just his own idea, but a general consciousness in Japanese society at that time, which was full of militarism. Toyotaro Oyama even tried to sabotage the negotiations with the idea of assassinating Hirobumi Ito. Ito Hirobumi, who had been struggling for Japan, was on the assassination list for failing to meet the demands of the activists.
In fact, Ito Hirobumi is also an ambitious militarist, but he has a more sober strategic sense than the fanatical angry youth of Koyama Toyotaro. Ito Hirobumi even sighed when he learned that Koyama Toyotaro had tried to assassinate himself: "The assassin might as well kill me." After this sentence reached Koyama Toyotaro's ears, he still had a relationship in his heart. These two militarists, who also harbored aggressive ambitions, developed an inexplicable sense of "sympathy for each other", but Ito always took the interests of the Empire as the highest goal. No matter how much he "felt sorry for Oyama", the assassination of foreign envoys did have a very bad international impact on Japan.
In this situation, Ito Hirobumi repeatedly asked the court to sentence Koyama Toyotaro to death. At that time, Japanese law stipulated that the death penalty for murder and attempted murder were sentenced to life imprisonment, so it was impossible to sentence Oyama to death according to the japanese law at that time. However, Ito believed that the assassination of foreign envoys had caused adverse political influence on Japan, so Ito's focus was actually on political reasons, and the court that could hear the case resisted the pressure exerted by Ito on the grounds of judicial independence. In the end, Koyama Wastarō was sentenced to life imprisonment and subsequently sent to Hokkaido to serve his sentence. However, just two years later, Toyotaro Koyama was commuted to 15 years in prison because of the amnesty. In 1907, Toyotaro Koyama was released from prison on parole.
The assassination of Li Hongzhang by Toyotaro Koyama is only a microcosm of Japan's modern path toward militarism. Despite his arrest and imprisonment, Toyotaro Koyama has seen a large number of fans in Japanese society. After his release from prison, Toyotaro Koyama wrote about his prison experiences in the book "Living Hell". The preface to the book reads: "My sin is because of the deep heart of the nation!" It can be seen that even after a prison sentence, Toyotaro Koyama still has no intention of repentance. In fact, not only did he himself not repent, but there was no reflection on the whole of Japan. Since then, Japan has gone further and further down the militarist road of internal dictatorship and external aggression.
After the September 18 Incident in 1931, Japan launched a war of aggression again. At this time, Koyama Toyotaro was once again ecstatic by the war. He believed that Japan had a chance to annex China during the Sino-Japanese War, a goal that had been delayed for decades, and was now on the verge of being achieved, he was excited to see Japanese militarism flourish in his lifetime. During the war, Toyotaro Oyama had been shouting for Japan's inflated ambitions, but what he eventually witnessed was the atomic bomb dropped by the U.S. military in 1945 and the surrender edict of the Japanese emperor. All this was nothing short of a thunderbolt on a sunny day for this fanatical militarist, who two years later finally died depressed at the age of 78.