The purpose of this paper is to trace the process that led to the establishment of the 400 million franc Russo-French loan to China, the first of the three indemnity loans after the Sino-Japanese War, with respect to the new diplomatic offensive of the Western powers and the structural change of Ch'ing foreign policy ; and to attempt to evaluate its position in the diplomatic history of the late Ch'ing period. Foreign loans to China, which before the Sino-Japanese War had been obtained chiefly from British banks and merchants in China by local authorities, had by the end of the war been reduced to a route that led from Robert Hart, the Inspector General of the Chinese Maritime Customs, to the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation and thence to the London money market. However, after the Three Power Intervention, while high officials of the Peking government bypassed Hart to assume direct responsibility for conducting loan negotiations, Gemany, France and Russia proposed to make a loan to China with the intention of undermining the monopoly of Great Britain in regard to foreign loans to China. At that time, the goverments and bank groups of both Germany and France had plans of organizing an international consortium and the international supervision of China's Customs, but the Russian government from the beginning had proceeded to negotiate with China independently. The Russian government sought the loan for China from French capital, and in order to make the conditions of the loan's issue beneficial to China the Russian government also gave a guarantee in the contract concluded by China as well as securing the approval of the French government for this scheme. Though Great Britain and Germany in response tried to frustrate the Russian scheme by warning the Tsungli-Yamen of the risk involved in accepting a loan guaranteed by Russia, China finally accepted the Russian offer. The Russo-French loan to China, which was concluded on July 6,1895, marked the beginning of the rivalry between the Russo-French bloc and the Anglo-German bloc in late Ch'inginternational ralations. In that year, France succeeded in obtaining the first railway concession in China with the aid of Russia, while Russia established the Russo-Chinese Bank which was to become an important weapon in her policy to penetrate into Manchuria after obtaining finance from the French bank group that participated in the Russo-French loan. On the other hand, bank groups of Great Britain and Germany entered into an agreement for the joint financing of Chinese loans, and this Anglo-German financial entente in China was to continue till the breakout of the First World War. For China, the Russo-French loan was the first diplomatic problem that the Peking government which up till that time had had very little to do with direct diplomatic negotiations coped with after the 1894-95 war under a drastically changed internal political structure and international environment without relying on local authorities. Though the Peking government did not possess the ability to deal with diplomatic problems sufficiently, it was able to get a loan on relatively favorable conditions because of the external factor of rivalry amongst the Western powers.

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The Chinese Eastern Railway (hereafter, CER), a useful shortcut for the Trans-Siberian Railway, was built by the Russian Empire under a contract concluded with the Qing Dynasty in 1896; and the resulting railway zone was administered solely by the Russians until 1917. Although the Russian community in the railway zone has been a popular topic of discussion among scholars in Japan, the U.S., Russia, and China, little is known about the railway zone itself, which comprised the legal and institutional structure of this "colony." The aim of this article is to clarify how the railway zone was formed, from the standpoints of both Russia and China. The article begins with an analysis of how the CER appropriated land. In the beginning, the scale of appropriation was limited to the immediate needs of railway construction ; later, however, S. Iu. Witte, the Russian finance minister and supervisor of the CER, instructed the railway engineers to expand appropriation to the greatest extent possible. In Harbin alone, which was the base of construction and the junction of the railway lines with the Songhua River, 11,533 hectares had been appropriated by 1902. The author argues that the reason for this was that Witte wanted the CER to sell or lease the land as a developer, in order to recover the cost of railway construction. The expansion of the railway zone was a concern for the Qing Dynasty's military governors in Manchuria, because such an expansion implied an increase in Russian influence within the Dynasty's homeland. Therefore, the governors made prompt attempts to Sinicize the area around the railway zone by means of colonies populated by Han settlers. The Russian Empire felt a sense of crisis in response to this movement and planned to settle Russian colonists within the railway zone. Eventually, the Qing Dynasty realized a significant increase in the Han population of Manchuria, while Russia's colonization plans did not materialize, owing to 1) a conflict of opinion among government ministries and 2) the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War. Despite its failure to realize a large-scale colonization project, Russian still managed to maintain extensive executive powers in the governance of the railway zone. The CER played the role of administrative organ and monitored both judicial affairs and the policing of the zone. It was in this way that Russia attempted to Russify the area. The railway zone was undeniably a part of Russia's informal empire ; however, China constantly sought opportunities to recapture sovereignty over the area. The railway zone would survive until the Manzhouguo government abolished it in 1936.

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At the end of nineteenth century, the Qing Dynasty form of governance was brought out from "behind the curtain" (chuiliang tingzheng 垂簾聴政) and directly assumed by Emperor Guangxu 光緒, while the Empress Dowager Cixi 慈禧 continued to enjoy a certain amount of political power. However, under the policy making mechanism shared by the Emperor and his mother, such empirical questions as how policy was actually decided, in what ways court retainers participated in the process and the interaction between the emperor and dowager when making policy decisions as yet remain unclear. The author's research to date, based on analysis of the diaries and correspondence of the central figures in the policy making process, indicates that imperial audiences, the submission of memorials and court retainer councils were the three main means for the opinions of the Empress Dowager during her reign "behind the curtain" to be integrated with those of court retainers. Building upon these findings, the present article attempts to reconstruct the decision making process during the direct rule of Emperor Guangxu using the same kind of source materials and analytical methodology. More specifically, the author turns to the two diaries written by Weng Tonghe 翁同和, entitled Weng Tonghe Riji 翁同和日記 and Suishouji 随手記, to examine the case of the dispatch of Li Hongzhang 李鴻章 to Japan as the plenipotentiary negotiator over the issue of ending the 1st Sino-Japanese War, and describe the process leading up to the decision to grant Li the authority to negotiate the conditions of the cession of Chinese territory to the Japanese. This case shows that court retainers considered the major venue for decision making to be direct audiences with the Emperor, supplemented by councils held in the Chuangxin Dian 伝心殿 hall. It was here that they debated and ironed out the direction they thought should be taken in recognizing territorial cession, from where they approached the Emperor to bring him over to their side. Meanwhile, the Emperor, from the very beginning of the process, used the presence of Weng Tonghe at these meetings to inject his own ideas into the general debate. Then, at the stage when cession became inevitable, the final decision was left to the Empress Dowager. However, Cixi refused to make the decision for reason of illness, thus forcing the Emperor to decide the matter on his own. It is at this point that we can observe the existence of maneuvering between the Emperor and his mother, in order to avoid responsibility for making the final decision, after the fateful audience with court retainers convinced the Emperor to approve the territorial cession. Furthermore, from their words and actions, the author concludes that it was the Emperor Guangxi and Empress Dowager that made the actual decisions concerning government policy.

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