First Sino-Japanese War, conflict between Japan and China in 1894–95 that marked the emergence of Japan as a major world power and demonstrated the weakness of the Chinese empire. The war grew out of conflict between the two countries for supremacy in Korea.The war developed from Russia's and Japan's rivalry for dominance in Korea and Manchuria. After the First Sino-Japanese War, Japan acquired the Liaodong Peninsula from China, but European powers forced Japan to return it. China subsequently leased it to Russia.China fought Japan with aid from the Soviet Union and the United States. After the Japanese attacks on Malaya and Pearl Harbor in 1941, the war merged with other conflicts of World War II as a major sector known as the China Burma India Theater.In truth, China lost the First Sino-Japanese War because of the corrupt and incompetent Qing Dynasty, which brutally exploited the Chinese, especially the Han people. ... The powerful Qing army enabled the dynasty to continuing abusing its people, and kept afloat an ugly system that should have ended long before it did.An organized rebellion came from a group of nationalistic, lower-ranking samurai in the western domains of Satsuma and Choshu in present day Kyushu, who understood that Japan needed to modernize in order to repel the Western powers, and who believed that the sidelining of the emperor in politics was something that
