Sino-French War - Aftermath

Aftermath

The peace treaty of June 1885 gave the French most of what they wanted. They were obliged to evacuate Formosa and the Pescadores (which Courbet had wanted to retain as a French counterweight to the British colony of Hong Kong), but the Chinese withdrawal from Tonkin left the way clear for them to reoccupy Lang Son and to advance up the Red River to Lao Cai on the Yunnan-Tonkin border. In the years that followed the French crushed a vigorous Vietnamese resistance movement and consolidated their hold on Annam and Tonkin. In 1887, Cochinchina, Annam and Tonkin (the territories which comprise the modern state of Vietnam) and Cambodia were incorporated into French Indochina. They were joined a few years later by Laos, ceded to France by Siam at the conclusion of the Franco-Siamese War of 1893. France had to drop demands for an indemnity from China.

Domestically, the unsatisfactory conclusion to the Sino–French War dampened enthusiasm for colonial conquest. The war had already claimed Ferry's scalp, and his successor Henri Brisson also resigned in the wake of the acrimonious 'Tonkin Debate' of December 1885, in which Clemenceau and other opponents of colonial expansion nearly succeeded in securing a French withdrawal from Tonkin. In the end, the Chamber voted the 1886 credits to support the Tonkin expeditionary corps by 274 votes to 270. If only three votes had gone the other way, the French would have left Tonkin. As Thomazi would later write, 'France gained Indochina very much against its own wishes.' The reverberations of the Tonkin Affair tarnished the reputation of the proponents of French colonial expansion generally, and delayed the realisation of other French colonial projects, including the conquest of Madagascar. It was not until the early 1890s that domestic political support for colonial expansion revived in France.

As far as China was concerned, the war hastened the emergence of a strong nationalist movement, and was a significant step in the decline of the Qing empire. The loss of the Fujian fleet on 23 August 1884 was considered particularly humiliating. The Chinese strategy also demonstrated the flaws in the late Qing national defence system of independent regional armies and fleets. The military and naval commanders in the south received no assistance from Li Hongzhang's Northern Seas (Beiyang) fleet, based in the Gulf of Zhili, and only token assistance from the Southern Seas (Nanyang) fleet at Shanghai. The excuse given, that these forces were needed to deter a Japanese penetration of Korea, was not convincing. The truth was, that having built up a respectable steam navy at considerable expense, the Chinese were reluctant to hazard it in battle, even though concentrating their forces would have given them the best chance of challenging France's local naval superiority. The Empress Dowager and her advisers responded in October 1885 by establishing a Navy Yamen on the model of the admiralties of the European powers, to provide unified direction of naval policy. The benefits of this reform were largely nullified by corruption, and although China acquired a number of modern ships in the decade after the Sino–French War the Chinese navies remained handicapped by incompetent leadership. The bulk of China's steamship fleet was destroyed or captured in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), and for decades thereafter China ceased to be a naval power of any importance.