Unequal treaties

The terms specified obligations to be borne almost exclusively by the Asian party and included provisions such as the cession of territory, payment of reparations, opening of treaty ports, relinquishment of the right to control tariffs and imports, and granting of extraterritoriality to foreign citizens.

"[3] However, within the scope of Chinese historiographical scholarship, the phrase has typically been defined to refer to the many cases in which China was effectively forced to pay large amounts of financial reparations, open up ports for trade, cede or lease territories (such as Outer Manchuria and Outer Northwest China (including Zhetysu) to the Russian Empire, Hong Kong and Weihaiwei to the United Kingdom, Guangzhouwan to France, Kwantung Leased Territory and Taiwan to the Empire of Japan, the Jiaozhou Bay concession to the German Empire and concession territory in Tientsin, Shamian, Hankou, Shanghai etc.

Foreign residents in the port cities were afforded trials by their own consular authorities rather than the Chinese legal system, a concept termed extraterritoriality.

[5] Germany was forced to terminate its rights, the Soviet Union surrendered them, and the United States organized the Washington Conference to negotiate them.

[8] After Chiang Kai-shek declared a new national government in 1927, the Western powers quickly offered diplomatic recognition, arousing anxiety in Japan.

[10] As World War I commenced, these acts voided the unequal treaty of 1861, resulting in the reinstatement of Chinese control on the concessions of Tianjin and Hankou to China.

In 1919, the post-war peace negotiations failed to return the territories in Shandong, previously under German colonial control, back to the Republic of China.

Widely perceived in China as a betrayal of the country's wartime contributions by the other conference members, the domestic backlash following the failure to restore Shandong would cause the collapse of the cabinet of the Duan Qirui government and lead to the May 4th movement.

[15] This event abruptly terminated Japan's 220 years of seclusion under the Sakoku policy of 1633 under unilateral foreign pressure and consequentially, the convention has been seen in a similar light as an unequal treaty.

The Ganghwa Island incident in 1875 saw Japan send the warship Un'yō led by Captain Inoue Yoshika with the implied threat of military action to coerce the Korean kingdom of Joseon through the show of force.

[25] As Japanese dominance over the Korean peninsula grew in the following decades, with respect to the unequal treaties imposed upon the kingdom by the West powers, Korea's diplomatic concessions with those states became largely null and void in 1910, when it was annexed by Japan.