Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that can help answer the question.
Query: When was the First Sino-Japanese War?
The Sino-Japanese War at Sea 1894 is a 2012 Chinese historical war film directed and written by Feng Xiaoning, starring Lu Yi, Xia Yu and others. It is based on the events in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, with emphasis on the naval battles and the career of the Chinese naval officer Deng Shichang. The film premiered in China at the International Convention Centre in Weihai, Shandong, on 26 June 2012.
On 26 March 1868, the first Naval Review was held in Japan (in Osaka Bay), with 6 ships from the private domainal navies of Saga, Chōshū, Satsuma, Kurume, Kumamoto and Hiroshima participating. The total tonnage of these ships was 2,252 tons, far smaller than the tonnage of the single foreign vessel (from the French Navy) that also participated. In July 1869, the Imperial Japanese Navy was formally established, two months after the last military engagement of the Boshin War – the private navies of the Japanese nobles were abolished and their 11 ships were added to the 7 surviving vessels of the defunct Tokugawa "bakufu" navy, including , Japan's first steam warship. This formed the core of the new Imperial Japanese Navy.
On January 18, 1952 The first president of South Korea Syngman Rhee declared that the vicinity of Dokdo was a territory of South Korea (Syngman Rhee line). Subsequently, some 3,000 Japanese fishermen who conducted fishery operations in this vicinity were captured. This incident, called the Dai Ichi Daihoumaru Ship case strained relations between South Korea and Japan.
The outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 saw aid flow into the Republic of China (ROC), from the United States under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. A series of Neutrality Acts had been passed in the US with the support of isolationists who forbade American aid to countries at war. Because the Second Sino-Japanese War was undeclared, however, Roosevelt denied that a state of war existed in China and proceeded to send aid to Chiang.
Guangxu (born 1871, reigned 1875–1908) ordered a series of reforms aimed at making sweeping social and institutional changes. He did this in response to weaknesses exposed by China's defeat by Japan in the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894–1895, not long after the First (1839–1842) and Second (1856–1860) Opium Wars; this blow came as a major shock to the Chinese, because Japan had been regarded as a tributary state, was much smaller than China, and was regarded as inferior. China also fought France in the Sino-French War from 1884 to 1885. Moreover, the defeat of China by Japan led to a scramble for "privileges" in China by other foreign powers, notably by the German Empire and Russia, further awakening the conservatives.
Japan tried to suppress Korean traditions and culture and ran the economy primarily for its own benefit. Korean resistance groups known as Dongnipgun (Liberation Army) operated along the Sino-Korean border, fighting guerrilla warfare against Japanese forces. Some of them took part in allied action in China and parts of South East Asia. One of the guerrilla leaders was the communist Kim Il-sung, who later became the first leader of North Korea.
In 1902 Japan and the British Empire forged the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, which would last until 1923. The purpose of this alliance was to contain the Russian Empire in East Asia. In response to this alliance, Russia formed a similar alliance with France and began to renege on agreements to reduce troop strength in Manchuria. From Russian perspective, it seemed inconceivable that Japan, a non-European power which was considered to be undeveloped (i.e. not-industrial), and almost bereft of natural resources, would challenge the Russian Empire. This view would change when Japan started and won the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05).
The nascent People's Republic did not yet control all of the territory of the Republic of China. Mao declared it his goal in 1950 to "liberate" Hainan, Tibet, and Formosa, and while he accomplished that of the first two, the third was interrupted: On 25 June 1950, the forces of North Korea invaded the South unleashing the Korean War. The United States Seventh Fleet was summarily dispatched to protect Formosa from a mainland Red Chinese invasion. Although Mao was apparently unenthusiastic about that war, a Chinese volunteer force entered the Korean War in November.
As an island, Taiwan on the contrary, was known before World War I as the Republic of Formosa, with Taiwan under Japanese rule occurring between 1895 and 1945. It is geographically separate from Mainland China where the Kuomintang (KMT) party first began. During World War II, the KMT party that came to found the Republic of China was also part of the formation of the Reorganized National Government of the Republic of China in Mainland China, within the Japanese Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
Since the historical triumph of the Battle of the Japanese Sea in 1905, as a part of the Russo-Japanese War, the Imperial Japanese Navy had been the world’s third strongest. By the end of World War I Japan had a powerful battle fleet. In the 1930s, following the Washington Naval Treaty, Japan built a strong naval aviation arm with excellent aircraft and pilots. Even so, the Imperial Japanese Navy could not compete against the Royal Navy and the United States Navy, the top two navies in the world. Consequently, the much smaller Kriegsmarine (German Navy) and the Regia Marina (Italian Navy) could not defeat these two dominants. Furthermore, the Imperial Japanese Navy had been made overconfident by its victory in the Naval Battle of the Japanese Sea and was not willing to acknowledge its inferiority. However, his unique experiences made him convinced of his view. Therefore, Yonai clearly announced his opinion: the Imperial Japanese Navy will lose if it attacked the Royal Navy and the United States Navy.
After the Portuguese first made contact with Japan in 1543, a large scale slave trade developed in which Portuguese purchased Japanese as slaves in Japan and sold them to various locations overseas, including Portugal itself, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Many documents mention the large slave trade along with protests against the enslavement of Japanese. Japanese slaves are believed to be the first of their nation to end up in Europe, and the Portuguese purchased large numbers of Japanese slave girls to bring to Portugal for sexual purposes, as noted by the Church in 1555. King Sebastian feared that it was having a negative effect on Catholic proselytization since the slave trade in Japanese was growing to massive proportions, so he commanded that it be banned in 1571
An early opportunity for Spain to enter China presented itself when the Chinese pirate Limahong attacked Manila in 1574. As Limahong was wanted by the Chinese authorities, officials in Fujian province were willing to let the Spanish establish a trade port on an island south of Xiamen in return for Limahong's capture. However, the governor of the Philippines at the time did not respond favourably, and the offer came to nothing when Limahong escaped from Manila. In the 1590s, the need for a Spanish base in China gained new urgency as Japan, ruled by the militant regent Toyotomi Hideyoshi, invaded Korea and threatened to conquer Ryukyu, China, Taiwan, and the Spanish Philippines. The "San Felipe" incident of 1596 and the subsequent execution of Franciscan friars in Nagasaki all but confirmed Japan's hostile intentions in Spanish eyes, and even the death of Hideyoshi in 1598 did not alleviate these fears. Thus, in 1598, governor Francisco de Tello de Guzmán sent Juan de Zamudio to the coast of China not only to establish trade, but also to warn Chinese authorities of possible Japanese aggression in its southern coast.
Ching Shih () (born Shih Yang (; 1775–1844), also known as Cheng I Sao (), was a former pirate who once terrorized the China Seas during the Jiaqing Emperor period of the Qing dynasty in the early 19th century. She commanded over 300 junks (traditional Chinese sailing ships) manned by 20,000 to 40,000 pirates—men, women, and even children. She entered into conflict with the major nations, such as the British Empire, the Portuguese Empire, and the Qing dynasty.
That the Japanese had suffered a military defeat at the hands of a motley collection of irregular forces was a considerable political embarrassment. Japan was anxious to present Manchukuo to the world as a peaceful nation, especially as a League of Nations delegation was now investigating the situation. When the news of the victories of Wang's Chinese People's National Salvation Army spread around eastern Kirin, hundreds of troops who had been reluctant members of the new Manchukuo Imperial Army defected to the NSA and estimates of its total strength in April rose from 4,500 to above 10,000 and, possibly nearer 15,000 organized in five brigades.
The Pacification of Manchukuo was a Japanese anti-insurgency campaign during the Second Sino-Japanese War to suppress any armed resistance to the newly established puppet state of Manchukuo from various anti-Japanese volunteer armies in occupied Manchuria and later the Communist Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army. The operations were carried out by the Imperial Japanese Kwantung Army and the collaborationist forces of the Manchukuo government from March 1932 until 1942, and resulted in a Japanese victory.
The "Meiji" government issued its First Naval Expansion bill in 1882, requiring the construction of 48 warships, of which 22 were to be torpedo boats. The naval successes of the French Navy against China in the Sino-French War of 1883–85 seemed to validate the potential of torpedo boats, an approach which was also attractive to the limited resources of Japan. In 1885, the new Navy slogan became "Kaikoku Nippon" (Jp:海国日本, "Maritime Japan").
In 1912, the Republic of China was established and Sun Yat-sen was inaugurated in Nanjing as the first Provisional President. But power in Beijing already had passed to Yuan Shikai, who had effective control of the Beiyang Army, the most powerful military force in China at the time. To prevent civil war and possible foreign intervention from undermining the infant republic, leaders agreed to Army's demand that China be united under a Beijing government. On March 10, in Beijing, Shikai was sworn in as the second Provisional President of the Republic of China.
In China, the Jin dynasty, which had united the nation prior in 280, began to quickly face troubles by the start of the century due to political infighting, which led to the opportunistic insurrections of the northern barbarian tribes (starting the Sixteen Kingdoms period), which quickly overwhelmed the empire, forcing the Jin court to retreat and entrench itself in the south past the Yangtze river, starting what is known as the Eastern Jin dynasty around 317. 
Towards the end of the century, Emperor of the Former Qin, Fu Jiān, united the north under his banner, and planned to conquer the Jin dynasty in the south, so as to finally reunite the land, but was decisively defeated at the Battle of Fei River in 383, causing massive unrest and civil war in his empire, thereby leading to the fall of the Former Qin, and the continued existence of the Eastern Jin dynasty.
The Republic of Formosa (), was a short-lived republic that existed on the island of Taiwan in 1895 between the formal cession of Taiwan by the Qing Dynasty of China to the Empire of Japan by the Treaty of Shimonoseki and it being taken over by Japanese troops. The Republic was proclaimed on 23 May 1895 and extinguished on 21 October, when the Republican capital Tainan was taken over by the Japanese. Though sometimes claimed as the first Asian republic to have been proclaimed, it was predated by the Lanfang Republic in Borneo, established in 1777, as well as by the Republic of Ezo in Japan, established in 1869.
The Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN; Kyūjitai: Shinjitai: "" "Navy of the Greater Japanese Empire", or "Nippon Kaigun", "Japanese Navy") was the navy of the Empire of Japan from 1868 until 1945, when it was dissolved following Japan's defeat and surrender in World War II. The Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) was formed after the dissolution of the IJN.
The Qin dynasty () was the first dynasty of Imperial China, lasting from 221 to 206 BC. Named for its heartland in Qin state (modern Gansu and Shaanxi), the dynasty was founded by Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor of Qin. The strength of the Qin state was greatly increased by the Legalist reforms of Shang Yang in the fourth century BC, during the Warring States period. In the mid and late third century BC, the Qin state carried out a series of swift conquests, first ending the powerless Zhou dynasty, and eventually conquering the other six of the Seven Warring States. Its 15 years was the shortest major dynasty in Chinese history, consisting of only two emperors, but inaugurated an imperial system that lasted, with interruption and adaptation, until 1912 CE.
Before the film ends, the narrator of the film drops an old photograph of Deng Shichang and his classmates at the Fujian Naval Academy into the sea. The photograph sinks to the bottom of the sea and comes to rest in the wreckage of a warship.Feng Xiaoning revealed that the screenplay for "The Sino-Japanese War at Sea 1894" was created over a period of 22 years. Qi Qizhang, the history consultant for the film, is the president of the China First Sino-Japanese War Research Association and was 90 years old when the film was released in 2012. Feng said, "When Mr Qi Qizhang first read my screenplay, he remarked, 'This is the best script about the First Sino-Japanese War I've seen in my life.'" Feng also consulted other history experts such as Xu Hua from the Military Museum of the Chinese People's Revolution and Chen Yue from the Naval History Research Association. They worked closely together to finalise the script and the lines spoken by the characters. The parts in the film about the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands is based on research done by Qi over many years.
The Second Sino-Japanese War began on 7 July 1937 with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in the Republic of China. The war, by some seen as the start of World War II, ended when the Empire of Japan surrendered to the Allies in August 1945. By the end of July 1937, fighting had escalated into a full-scale war and both countries deployed their air forces, ground troops, and warships into combat. Japanese heavy bombers also extensively bombed Chinese factories, airfields and conducted the first major air-raids against civilian targets in the war.
On 7 July 1937 the Second Sino-Japanese War officially erupted, which saw the relations between China and Japan completely eroded especially once it was announced that Japan would hold the 1938 Far Eastern Championship Games. The tournament would be officially cancelled while Japan held their own tournament called the Anniversary of the Japanese Empire, which included the Japanese occupied Manchukuo to represent China. None of the games during the Second Sino-Japanese War are officially recognized and once the war ended on 9 September 1945 China looked to the Olympics once again for international recognition. On 2 August 1948 China competed in the Football at the 1948 Summer Olympics where they were once again knocked out in the last sixteen, this time by Turkey national football team in a 4–0 defeat. When the players returned they found the country in the midst of the Chinese Civil War. When it ended, the team had been split into two, one called the Chinese national football team and the other called Republic of China national football team (later renamed Chinese Taipei national football team).
The First Sino-Japanese War breaks out in 1894. The navies of the two empires clash at the battles of Pungdo and the Yellow Sea. At the Yellow Sea, after an exchange of gunfire between warships from both sides over a few hours, most of the Beiyang Fleet is destroyed while not a single Japanese ship is sunk even though the Japanese ships also sustained heavy damage. Deng Shichang's ship, the "Zhiyuan", has been badly damaged. Deng gives orders for the "Zhiyuan" to ram the Japanese flagship "Yoshino", but the "Zhiyuan" is sunk before it makes contact with the "Yoshino". Deng stubbornly refuses to escape with the survivors and eventually drowns at sea with his pet dog.