ization that Japan was making, and greatly admired the Japanese for the ease with which they defeated China. But some European powers regarded with grave misgivings the appearance of a new competitor in the game of cutting up the “Chinese melon,” as they sometimes called it. Russia, Germany, and France, banding together, forced Japan to return the Liaotung Peninsula to China. In 1898, however, these powers cynically extorted pieces of Chinese territory from the tottering Manchu dynasty. The French took Kwangchow Bay in South China; the Germans, the city of Tsingtao and the adjacent Kiaochow Bay area; and the Russians seized the Liaotung Peninsula which Japan had been forced to give up two years earlier. Britain, not to be outdone by European rivals, expanded her foothold at Hongkong in South China and occupied the port of Wei-hai-wei in the north.
Although the Japanese were infuriated by the duplicity of Germany and France, they clearly realized that Russia, dominant in Manchuria and interfering more and more in Korea, was the chief enemy that must be defeated before Japan could resume its own program of expansion in Asia. The Japanese knew that Russia standing alone would be a dangerous foe for Japan to face and that a coalition of European powers would be disastrous for Japanese ambitions. Of this realization was born the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902, a military pact between Japan and the greatest naval power of the day, in which each country agreed to come to the aid of the other if its ally, while engaged in war with one power, should be attacked by another. The British were not averse to seeing their
