Still other problems arose, most notably in the summer of 1899 when bubonic plague broke out at Yingkou, a town on the South Manchurian branch near Dalny. To contain its spread, troops cordoned off land approaches to the port and quarantined steamers and junks in the harbor. Before these measures could take effect, at least 1,400 had died in the nearby construction camps.
Nevertheless, by the spring of 1900, it appeared that nothing could prevent the completion of the line. Some of the temporary wooden bridges had even been replaced with structures of metal or stone, a number of stations had been built, and more than half of the Chinese Eastern’s 1,575 miles of track had been laid. Harbin was developing into a full-scale metropolis, military and naval installations were increasingly fortifying Port Arthur, and Dalny seemed likely to fulfill its promise as a great commercial port.
Within a few months, however, all the optimism created by Russia’s gains would begin to fade.
Unwilling to countenance the partition of China so as to be excluded from the China trade, the United States in September 1899 had spelled out its “Open Door” policy, and in the following July pledged to protect China’s territorial integrity. This was in no way consoling to Japan, which had triumphed over China only to see its hard-won treaty rights revoked and redistributed to rival European powers. Nor was it convincing to the Chinese, who wanted the foreigners off their soil. The Russians were neither more nor less hated than the rest, but, as one historian puts it, “the leasehold appropriation of Port Arthur and Dalny – to say nothing of the imminent incursion of a 600-mile Chinese Eastern branch down the full length of Manchuria’s most prosperous and densely inhabited valley – infuriated Chinese nationalists.”597 Li Hung-chang was exiled to South China, and the leaders of the delegation who had approved the lease of the ports were put to death. A secret society of fanatical patriots arose, calling itself the “Righteous and Harmonious Fists” (or “Boxers”). They practiced martial arts as a physical and spiritual discipline, grew rapidly in numbers, and (with the tacit approval of the Empress Dowager) spearheaded the anti-foreign reaction. Chinese regulars covertly cooperated with them, as xenophobic fury swept the land. Foreigners everywhere in China were in danger, and many massacres occurred.
In the summer of 1900, the Boxers began to derail trains, burn bridges, and destroy miles of telegraph and railway installations in the Mukden region. Chinese troops, covertly working with the Boxers, blew up a Russian ammunition dump and killed about thirty officers and men. They tried to blockade the Amur River, destroyed the Russian railway near Harbin, and interdicted rail transport to Port Arthur. Harbin came under attack, but a disciplined contingent of Witte’s paramilitary railway police fended the Chinese off until a detachment of Russian regulars arrived. When War Minister Alexei Kuropatkin heard of the Boxer Rebellion, he is said to have remarked, “I am very glad. This will give us an excuse for seizing Manchuria.”598
A direct pretext was found in the pretended plans for a Chinese attack on Blagoveshchensk, one of the major Russian settlements on the Amur’s left bank. The attack had supposedly been set for July 2, and rumors spread that there was a large Chinese force gathering nearby at Aigun. When shots were fired from Aigun at a passing Russian steamer, panic seized the Russian community. Manchu insurgents were said to have infiltrated the town, each provided with a length of rope with which to strangle a Russian in his bed. The Russian commander ordered the immediate expulsion of all eight thousand Chinese residents (more than half the town), who were rounded up in house-to-house searches – including old men, cripples, invalids, women, and children – and on July 14 driven at bayonet point into the river. Those who resisted were killed on the spot. Nearly all the rest were drowned. In fact, five days before this completely premeditated massacre, Kuropatkin had secretly authorized the invasion of Manchuria. Some 200,000 troops were hurriedly mobilized, and six army corps poured across the border, occupying the whole province, north and south. Sixty-eight Chinese villages were burnt to the ground, leaving nothing but blackened posts and crumbling ruins. “Nothing and nobody was spared.”599 In September, Russian battalions converged on Mukden and other Manchurian strongholds held by rebels and drove them out.
Meanwhile, every other power that had a stake in the country had sent expeditionary forces to suppress the uprising and to rescue besieged foreign legations in Peking. The capital and its environs were occupied in August 1900, and the imperial palaces looted, the foreigners (having united into an International Force) not withdrawing until December, when the rebellion had been completely suppressed. The Russians, however, remained in Manchuria, in effect as an army of occupation, under the pretense of protecting the Chinese Eastern and its South Manchurian extension while they were being rebuilt. Two thirds of the railway, including the junction stations at Mukden and Liaoyang, had been destroyed or damaged in the turmoil, and the flight of Chinese workers had reduced the labor force by almost half. As reconstruction began, Russians filled the gap. Despite an outbreak of cholera that swept through almost every camp on the line, and even struck Harbin, on July 1, 1903, the Chinese Eastern, with stone bridges of “Roman massiveness,” and otherwise probably the most solidly built stretch of the whole Trans-Siberian, opened to Vladivostok, with its branch lines to Port Arthur and Dalny. Of course, construction costs had soared well beyond the original estimates, but Witte’s budgets somehow managed to conceal the losses incurred. In trying to decipher his figures, hapless analysts in the British Embassy in St. Petersburg were reportedly driven to tears.
But a different kind of price would be paid. By strengthening its bid for standing as a Pacific power, and especially by extending its influence into Manchuria, Russia had upset the strategic balance in East Asia; and so to forestall any further Russian advance, Britain now sought collaboration with Japan.
It was Britain that Russia feared most. While Russia had been acquiring dominion over Poland and Finland in the west, extending its sway down the Amur River Valley in the east, and into the Caucasus and Central Asia, Britain was establishing its hold on India and Upper Burma, Malaysia, North Borneo, and Hong Kong. It was poised on the borders of Afghanistan, Persia, Nepal, and Tibet, and dominated two thirds of China’s coastal export trade. “Russian and British expansion,”600 notes one historian, “had produced a situation where the spheres of influence of the two Empires were so contiguous that if either stirred they were bound to collide.” In the Far East, Britain had little manpower strength, but the French Foreign Minister prophetically remarked in 1901 that England might seek in Japan the soldier that she lacked. Just one year later Japan entered into a full-scale defensive alliance with England; moreover, Russia failed to realize that Japan had become a major world power in its own right.
The once-insular island empire had recently undergone an astonishing modernization along Western lines. Formerly xenophobic, it now welcomed foreigners in every port, sent officers to German military academies for training, and future admirals to Great Britain, where Japanese warships were being built. Japan’s aspirations as an area power inevitably stretched to the mainland, where in part in response to growing Russian hegemony, it had attacked China in 1894. Subsequently obliged under international pressure to relinquish Port Arthur and other strategic gains, it had seen Russia acquire some of them by a secret convention with Peking. In addition, a group of adventurers at the Russian court had begun to promote a scheme for timber concessions on the Yalu River, with designs on Korea.‡‡‡‡‡ Japan immediately began to enlarge its own Korean holdings with thousands of new settlers and to insist, in secret negotiations, on spheres of influence that would cede Manchuria to Russia but gain Korea for itself.