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

6 Stars! S.C.M. Paine delivers a tight, incisive and analytical review of what really is a "kick-off" to Asian problems for the next century. Japan vs. China, Japan vs. Russia, problems with Korean, British, French, American interests and German advice...all resulting in a delicious historical quagmire.Clear prose, clear analysis and clear incites backed with relevant quotes from contemporary newspapers, statesmen and foreign government commentaries.What a sophisticated history book should be...enjoyable and fascinating reading.

This is a fairly easy book to read through. The prose is interesting and engaging. I particularly thought that his quotes from period newspapers were a very good way of showing contemporaneous views of the war. And until I read the book, I did not realize what a historic event it was in terms of not only Japan-China relations, but of also of modern warfare in general and Japan and China's relations with the West. The only thing that annoyed me was the author was constantly repeating himself, and I do mean over and over again.

Just finished "The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895: Perceptions, Power, and Primacy" and its one of the best books I have read in years.If you are interested in Russian, Korean, Chinese, Japanese or Pacific history, you will enjoy this book.Although its academic, its accessible and Paine's writing reminded me of Paul Kennedy's. Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers is one of my favorite books of all time.Great book!

This is an unusually good political-military account of an important and complex series of events often simply hidden under the name, the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95. Based on solid primary sources, written in a lucid yet very detailed manner, the author unravels the intermixed and cross-currents of interests, perceptions, and actions that make up the further decline of Qing China and the rise of Japan to great power status.

I learned a great deal from this book, and enjoyed reading it. The coverage of the war was somewhat brief, but it wasn't much of a war. The explanation of why it happened, why the Japanese won so easily, and the discussion of its effect on world affairs were excellent. I highly recommend it.

This book is well researched and well written. It paints a complete picture of the events which took place, the reasons behind the moves and the players involved. I unreservedly recommend this book to anyone interested in this topic.

an interesting look at a critically important but overlooked period.

The Kindle edition of this book is horrendous. Chinese and Cyrillic text shows regularly as image files, even though other sections are typeset, making it impossible to adjust their size in the Kindle app. It is also rife with misspellings, of which I've noticed in English and Chinese (I can't read the Russian, but I presume similar results). Whoever compiled the e-book ought to have had someone take a second read of it because it distracts greatly from an informative monograph.

S.C.M. Paine's `The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895: Perceptions, Power and Primacy' is one of the most recent volumes on an oft-neglected war and most certainly an invaluable addition to any relevant library.Paine has spent a long time carving out a unique niche for herself in the study of turn off the century Asia, primarily looking at Western interpretations and historiography. This is commendable of course and most certainly adds to this field of study, but it is not without its problems.My main gripe with this work is that it actually deals very little with the history of the war. One reviewer on Amazon.com stated that her treatment of the war itself was the most detailed account published in English. This couldn't be further from the truth. The book is roughly 350 pages long and 150 pages are devoted to a narrative of the war. However, the text continually stops and starts, constantly referring to how different newspapers (her main sources) and onlookers perceived the events. Often at times the narrative doesn't even stay within a chronological frame, jumping around erratically to discuss similar themes many months after the one that was just described. Also, when time is devoted to describing the events of the war, the descriptions are very lacklustre and offer very little real information on what was going on. The only time Paine does sufficient justice to the history is when she tackles the naval aspect of the war, which is of course her forte. However, this comes at a price and the reader is suddenly assailed with maritime and naval terminology probably unknown to the vocabulary of the layman. As such, overall Paine gives a poor, jumbled and confusing narrative of the war.Many of these problems extend to the other chapters in the book. There is a large introduction which details the build-up to the war from the different perspectives of China, Japan, Korea and Russia. These are not unwelcome, and do most certainly provide excellent background, but they suffer from a similar jumbled approach to the middle section of the book. The text jumps around from differing perspectives and the reader is often left confused as to what was supposed to be happening in the tumultuous years preceding the war. A simple timeline would have gone a long, long way here.The conclusion has been touted by reviewers as the tour de force of the book. Her treatment of the Treaty of Shimonoseki was excellent, but later chapters fell short of this high standard, often devolving into un-sourced generalisation and opinion, with little relevance to the war itself. Paine also has a preoccupation with the anthropological concept of `face', which certainly adds another dimension to the work, but often feels shoehorned in.My final concern is that the maps, of which there are only four, are atrocious, bordering on abysmal. They are dark, murky and indecipherable. One wonders how they ever made it into the final product, as they distract heavily from the otherwise good quality of the text they accompany.The book does have its good points. Paine makes a very convincing argument and her thesis is sound. She sets out to achieve the purpose of her book and does so magnificently. However, without a solid narrative, this book just seems like a specialist supplementary. Out of the handful of modern Western volumes on the war, most are social or political histories. To find an actual detailed narrative of the war, one has to go back over one hundred years to the historians writing at the time of the conflict. Whilst Paine has carved out a unique and original place for herself in this historiographical field of study, she missed a golden opportunity to provide a fresh, comprehensive history of the war.

Great detailPresents the historic environment without leaving uncoveres eventsMust buy

Die Entwicklungen der internationalen Beziehungen in Ostasien wurden durch diesen Konflikt bedeutend internationalisiert. Die Autor hat in ihrer sehr guten Forschungsarbeit wichtige Aspekte des Konflikts um die Vorherrschaft in Ostasien sehr nachvollziehbar dargestellt. Sehr lesenswert, wenn man verstehen möchte, wie die moderne und postmoderne Staatenwelt Ostasiens zu erklären ist.