Peking ceded Formosa to Japan in 1895, whereupon Japan became the first Asian power in modern times to possess a colony, and the island became a testing ground for imperial policies. For two centuries the Formosan Chinese had resisted authority imposed upon them by inefficient continental Chinese. Now, Tokyo extended to insular Formosa many organizing, modernizing measures characterizing Japan's own vigorous Meiji Revolution. During the next fifty years, as living standards rose to approach those of Japan proper, early leaderless Formosan resistance to alien rule developed into organized appeals for effective representation in local government and at Tokyo. With reversion to continental Chinese control at the end of World War II, Formosans expected to conserve and enhance gains made during the Japanese era. Bitter disappointment promptly led again to rebellious relations with the continent. The author, long resident in Formosa and exclusively concerned with Formosan affairs while in government service during and after World War II, is well qualified to comment upon Formosa's history and prospects. He concludes that the Japanese era left an ineradicable mark upon the island people, an understanding of which will illuminate developments when Peking later undertakes the formidable task of converting Formosa into a fully disciplined and integrated province of the People's Republic of China.

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These essays, by thirteen specialists from Japan and the United States, provide a comprehensive view of the Japanese empire from its establishment in 1895 to its liquidation in 1945. They offer a variety of perspectives on subjects previously neglected by historians: the origin and evolution of the formal empire (which comprised Taiwan, Korea, Karafuto. the Kwantung Leased Territory, and the South Seas Mandated Islands), the institutions and policies by which it was governed, and the economic dynamics that impelled it. Seeking neither to justify the empire nor to condemn it, the contributors place it in the framework of Japanese history and in the context of colonialism as a global phenomenon. Contributors are Ching-chih Chen. Edward I-te Chen, Bruce Cumings, Peter Duus, Lewis H. Gann, Samuel Pao-San Ho, Marius B. Jansen, Mizoguchi Toshiyuki, Ramon H. Myers, Mark R. Peattie, Michael E. Robinson, E. Patricia Tsurumi. Yamada Saburō, Yamamoto Yūzoō.

This accessible collection examines twelve historic events in the international relations of East Asia.

A rich empirical account of China's foreign economic policy towards Japan after World War Two, drawing on hundreds of recently declassified Chinese sources. Amy King offers an innovative conceptual framework for the role of ideas in shaping foreign policy, and examines how China's Communist leaders conceived of Japan after the war. The book shows how Japan became China's most important economic partner in 1971, despite the recent history of war and the ongoing Cold War divide between the two countries. It explains that China's Communist leaders saw Japan as a symbol of a modern, industrialised nation, and Japanese goods, technology and expertise as crucial in strengthening China's economy and military. For China and Japan, the years between 1949 and 1971 were not simply a moment disrupted by the Cold War, but rather an important moment of non-Western modernisation stemming from the legacy of Japanese empire, industry and war in China.

The rise and fall of the Japanese empire constitutes one of the most dramatic episodes of modern history. Within the short span of fifty years Japan grew out of political backwardness into a position of tremendous power. Japan's rise to power challenged Europe's hegemony over Asia, but, paradoxically, it was Japan's fall that caused the irreparable ruin of the colonial system over Eastern lands. Japan went to war against the West under the battlecry of Asia's liberation from European colonialism. In reality, for forty years, beginning with her first war against China, she had striven to imitate this colonialism, as she had endeavoured to imitate the political, military and economic achievements of Europe. A thorough understanding of the imitative character of the Japanese Empire might well have induced the leaders of the nation to side with the conservative trend of political thought in the Western world in order to maintain the existing world-wide political system of which colonial rule was an accepted part. They might have understood that an adventurous, revolutionary policy was bound to result in grave dangers for their own state and most conservative structure. Japan might have continued to grow and to expand if she had succeeded to play the role of the legitimate heir to Europe's decaying power in Asia. By violently opposing that power, she undermined the very foun dations of her own rule outside the home-islands.