# Chapter Fifteen — Small Countries With Large Invaders

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## The Korean Battleground

You may be thinking that there is a war in almost every chapter of this book. That’s very close to the truth! Wars have been part of history since the beginning. But in the modern age, when countries all over the world began to build railroads and roads, and began to use steam to power trains and ships, it became much easier to move large numbers of soldiers and weapons around. The wars between countries began to get bigger. More soldiers crowded the battlefields, with more powerful weapons—and caused much more destruction.

The next war of the modern age exploded between the vast country of China and Japan, just off China’s eastern coast. The last time we visited China, the enormous Taiping Rebellion had just ended, and the Qing emperor had (just barely) managed to hang onto his power. And when we last read about Japan, the shogun had just been removed from power; the Meiji emperor had taken back his throne, but the country had also elected an assembly to help him rule and had written a constitution, just like a Western democracy.

Although China was much bigger than Japan, Japan had been growing steadily stronger, and the Qing dynasty of China had been growing weaker and weaker. In 1894, Japan challenged China’s power, and a war began. But the war wasn’t fought in Japan or China. It was fought in Korea.

The little country of Korea lay between these two hostile neighbors, on a peninsula that jutted down from the Chinese province of Manchuria, into the Sea of Japan. The king of Korea, King Kojong, ruled with the help of his wife Queen Min.

As a matter of fact, many people thought that Queen Min was the real ruler of Korea. Kojong, the twenty-sixth king of the royal Chosun dynasty of Korea, became king when he was only eleven years old. Because he was so young, he had a regent to rule for him. The regent took control of the country, and of Kojong. Young Kojong became very used to doing as he was told.

When he was fourteen, he was told that it was time for him to get married. His bride had already been picked out for him. She was a fifteen-year-old lady of the court named Min.

Kojong did as he was told. Min turned out to be very different from the placid, obedient Kojong. She was a strong-willed, intelligent young lady, and she was much more ambitious than her fourteen-year-old husband.

Min didn’t like the regent who was ruling for King Kojong. She didn’t like the way he treated her husband, and she didn’t like his ideas about how the country should be run. For many years, Korea had treated China as an “older brother” or a “father” country. Korea traded only with China, and sent ambassadors only to China—not to any other country. Korea became known as the “Hermit Country” because it would deal only with China. King Kojong’s regent wanted to keep this old-fashioned arrangement. But Min, along with many other Koreans, thought that the time had come for Korea to start trading with other countries, and especially with Japan.

For the first seven years of her marriage, Min did her best to make sure that as many of her relatives as possible got positions in the Korean government as ministers, army officers, and other officials. When she was twenty-two, Min convinced her husband that it was time for him to take power. All of her relatives agreed. The regent had no choice but to step down. King Kojong now ruled in his own name—but Queen Min was the most powerful leader in the palace.

Very soon, King Kojong and Queen Min signed a trade treaty with Japan, so that Japanese ships could dock at three Korean ports to buy Korea’s iron and coal. But Korea also wanted to remain friends with China. So China and Japan made a deal with each other. Since neither country wanted the other to take control of Korea, they agreed that Korea would be protected by both China and Japan, and that neither Japan nor China could send soldiers into Korea without the agreement of the other country.

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For a little while, this agreement seemed to work. But in 1894, King Kojong was faced with a problem. A new religious group called the Tonghak, in the south of Korea, started to collect weapons and plan a rebellion. Like the Taiping Rebellion in China, the Tonghak Rebellion was started by poor peasants who were miserable with their lives and angry with their leaders. King Kojong didn’t want the Tonghak Rebellion to swell into an enormous civil war. So he sent a message to China, asking for Chinese soldiers to help defeat the rebels.

The Qing emperor agreed. China borrowed a British warship, loaded soldiers onto it, and sent them out into the ocean to sail south towards Korea. When the Japanese found out that China was sending soldiers into Korea without Japanese approval they were indignant. China had broken its agreement with Japan! The Japanese believed that the Chinese were out to capture Korea for themselves—and so Japanese soldiers sank the British ship with the Chinese soldiers on board.

This meant war.

By August 1, 1894, China and Japan had declared war on each other. The “Sino-Japanese” (Chinese-Japanese) War had begun. But the war didn’t take place in China or in Japan. Chinese and Japanese soldiers met in Korea, and fought on Korean soil.

China’s army turned out to be no match for Japan’s modern soldiers, armed with Western weapons. In less than eight months, Japan had marched from southern Korea up into China itself. China had to agree to sign a peace treaty that gave Korea total independence from China, and also gave the Japanese large territories once held by China. European countries such as Germany, France, Russia, and Great Britain took advantage of China’s weakness to seize other bits of China for themselves. This time is sometimes called the “Scramble for China.”

Meanwhile, what about Korea?

Although Korea was now completely independent from China, there were plenty of Japanese soldiers still occupying Korean land. Many Koreans were pleased to see the Japanese in Korea, because they believed that Japan would become a strong ally of Korea. But Queen Min was worried about Japan. She doubted that Korea would remain free. Instead, she feared, Japan would first seize her country, and then rule over it.

Queen Min sent messages to Russia, asking the Russians whether they would become Korea’s allies against *both* China *and* Japan. When the Japanese and the pro-Japanese Koreans heard about Queen Min’s attempt to get Russia on her side *against* Japan, the Queen’s fate was sealed.

Early on an October morning in 1895—only weeks after the war had ended—three assassins broke into the Queen’s palace. They killed Queen Min and then escaped to Japan. When other countries protested that Japan should punish the assassins, the Japanese tried the culprits in a public court, and then announced that there was just not enough evidence to convict them.

Fifteen years after Queen Min died, Japan made Korea part of the Japanese Empire. Queen Min’s fears had come true; Korea had lost its independence, and Japan had taken over her little country.

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## The Spanish-American War

Off the coast of China, south of both Japan and Korea, lay another small country: a gathering of islands called the Philippines. There, a small boy named José Rizal was born to a very wealthy family. José’s parents wanted to give him the best of everything, including the best education. So when José was old enough he went to the most prestigious college in the Philippines. Afterwards, his parents sent him to university—in Spain.

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Why in Spain? Because the Philippines were part of the Spanish Empire.

As José Rizal grew, read, and studied, he began to believe that the Spanish rule over the Philippines was unfair. Why should this European country, so many thousands of miles away, tell Filipinos how to run their country? The people of the Philippines—like the people of Canada, Acheh, Ireland, Ethiopia, and many more countries—had the right to govern themselves.

José Rizal didn’t start a revolution, or organize rebels into a secret society that would oppose the Spanish. Instead, he wrote a novel called *Touch Me Not*. If you picked up this novel to read it, you might think that it was simply a love story about a young man named Crisostoma Ibarra and a beautiful girl named Maria Clara. But the novel had a hidden message in it. In *Touch Me Not*, José Rizal described the Spanish government as cruel, unjust, and oppressive. Filipinos who read Rizal’s novel began to think, like Rizal, that the Philippines should be independent, ruled by Filipinos and not by Spain.

José Rizal’s novel wasn’t read only by Filipinos. On the other side of the world, other Spanish-ruled colonists read *Touch Me Not*. These colonists lived in Cuba, an island country that lay south of the United States, just below the state of Florida. Cuba was also governed by Spain. The Cuban colony was important because so many fields of sugarcane grew there. Cuba supplied Spain with a good part of its sugar, and the sale of Cuban sugar to other countries made Spain richer.

But many Cubans, including those who read Rizal’s novel, began to think that they, too, should be independent from Spain. Cubans who were unhappy with Spanish rule began to argue, write, and talk about Cuban independence. A few decided that talking and writing weren’t enough. Cubans would have to fight for their freedom! These violent revolutionaries announced that their slogan was “*¡Independencia o muerte!*” (“Independence or death!”).

These Cubans believed it was better to be dead than to be ruled by Spain. And some of them began to die when Spain sent soldiers into Cuba to fight against the revolutionaries.

People in the United States of America knew what was happening in Cuba. Many Americans were sympathetic to the Cuban revolutionaries. After all, the United States had fought a revolution to win freedom from Great Britain. As the fighting to the south went on, the United States Congress declared, on behalf of the people of the United States, that Cuba should be free and independent from Spain. American newspapers printed articles about the “Cuban crisis” on their front pages, day after day.

Sometimes, these newspapers made the Cuban crisis sound even worse than it was. The largest American newspapers, just before the year 1900, were the *New York Journal*, owned by a businessman named William Randolph Hearst, and the *New York World*, owned by Joseph Pulitzer. Today, a very distinguished prize given to newspaper reporters who do excellent work is named after Joseph Pulitzer—the “Pulitzer Prize.”

Hearst and Pulitzer discovered that, on days when stories about Cuba were printed on the front pages of the *New York Journal* and the *New York World*, people bought more newspapers. So both newspapers began running stories about Cuba, even when there wasn’t much news coming out of the “Cuban crisis.” Sometimes these stories about Cuba were exaggerated. Sometimes, they were just plain lies! The newspapers even made up interviews with make-believe “eyewitnesses” who claimed that they had seen Spanish soldiers and officials treating Cubans with terrible cruelty. William Randolph Hearst sent an artist named Frederic Remington to Cuba, and told him to send back drawings of events so grim and ghoulish that Americans would beg the United States to go to war on Cuba’s behalf. When Frederic Remington protested that the Spanish weren’t actually treating Cubans quite *that* badly, and that there was no need for a war to begin, Hearst replied, “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”

Why were Hearst and Randolph eager for war? Because during wars, hundreds of thousands of people bought newspapers to find out what was happening.

Hearst and Pulitzer were willing to do anything to sell newspapers, including inventing stories and making up interviews and pictures. Some smaller newspapers copied them. But other editors were disgusted. One said that journalism (newspaper writing) had simply become “a varied assortment of new lies.”

Then something true and newsworthy truly *did* happen. On February 15, 1898, after the “Cuban crisis” had been going on for several years, a United States battleship called the *Maine* blew up in a Cuban harbor. Two hundred and sixty Americans died. Spanish officials said the explosion had been an accident. Something inside the *Maine* must have caught fire and blown up the ship. But American officials insisted that the *Maine* had been blown up by a bomb, planted by a Spanish spy.

To this day, no one knows exactly what destroyed the *Maine*—although most experts think that it probably wasn’t a Spanish bomb. But in 1898, most Americans were ready to believe that the Spanish had deliberately blown up an American ship. The newspapers saw a wonderful chance to sell more copies. Paper after paper printed stories about how the Spanish had attacked United States soldiers. The stories called for the United States Congress to declare war on Spain. Headlines read, “Remember the *Maine*!” The *New York Journal* printed a million copies of its newspaper, urging the United States to attack Spain.

On April 19, 1898, the United States Congress voted to go to war with Spain. This war wouldn’t just take place in Cuba. Instead, United States ships would attack the Spanish navy all over the world, wherever Spanish warships sailed.

This included the Philippines!

The Assistant Secretary of the Navy, the man who would help direct the United States battleships as they organized their attacks, was a man named Theodore Roosevelt. (He would later become president.)

Theodore Roosevelt ordered American ships to sail to the Philippines, attack the Spanish fleet docked there, and destroy the Spanish ships. Meanwhile, American and Spanish soldiers fought with each other in Cuba. Theodore Roosevelt himself led a band of soldiers nicknamed the Rough Riders into Cuba. The most famous battle fought by the Rough Riders took place on July 1, when Roosevelt and his men charged up a hill called San Juan Hill, driving the Spanish army back.

The Philippines and Cuba weren’t the only places where Americans and Spanish were fighting. The United States also sent eighteen thousand soldiers to land on the island of Puerto Rico, near Cuba. Puerto Rico was also part of the Spanish Empire.

But before much fighting could take place in Puerto Rico, Spain agreed to surrender. On December 10, 1898, Spain and America signed a treaty called the Treaty of Paris. This treaty decreed that Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, and another small island called Guam would no longer belong to Spain. But none of these countries were given independence. Instead, they would be ruled by the United States of America!

The people of the Philippines were particularly angry about this. They declared that they wouldn’t be ruled by the American president. Instead, they wanted their own president, a man named Emilio Aguinaldo. Aguinaldo told the United States that America was acting in a way that was “violent and aggressive” against the people of the Philippines. When the United States refused to give the Philippines complete independence, Emilio Aguinaldo declared that the Philippines were now at war with the U.S.

But Aguinaldo’s forces were not strong enough to withstand American troops. In 1901, American soldiers invaded the Philippines and captured Aguinaldo. He had to agree to take an oath of loyalty to the United States, and to retire as president of the Philippines. In return, the American Congress agreed that the Philippines would be ruled by two groups of lawmakers. One group would be made up of Filipino leaders, elected by the people of the Philippines. The members of the other group would be selected by the American Congress.

In the Spanish-American War and the fighting that followed it, over two hundred thousand Filipinos died. The Philippines were free from Spain and had their own government. But this government existed in the shadow of a larger, stronger country—the United States.

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