It Is The Special Misfortune Of China That She Cannot Engage In
Any, Even A Defensive, War With A Maritime
Power without incurring the
grave risk, or indeed the practical certainty, that if such a war be
continued for any
Length of time she must find herself involved with every
other foreign country through the impossibility of confining the hostility
of her own subjects to one race of foreigners in particular. In
considering the last war with a European country in which China was
engaged, due allowance must be made for these facts, and also for the
anomalous character of that contest, when active hostilities were carried
on without any formal declaration of war - a state of things which gave the
French many advantages. Toward the end of the year 1882, the French
government came to the decision to establish a "definite protectorate"
over Tonquin. Events had for some time been shaping themselves in this
direction, and the colonial ambition of France had long fixed on Indo-
China as a field in which it might aggrandize itself with comparatively
little risk and a wide margin of advantage. The weakness of the kingdom of
Annam was a strong enough temptation in itself to assert the protectorate
over it which France had, more or less, claimed for forty years; but when
the reports of several French explorers came to promote the conviction
that France might acquire the control of a convenient and perhaps the best
route into some of the richest provinces of interior China without much
difficulty, the temptation became irresistible.
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