The 1874 Sino-Japanese sovereignty debates constituted one of the few diplomatic victories in late Qing history. As predicted by Japanese legal advisor Gustav Boissonaide, the Qing officials invoked the treaty obligations and international law to question the legality of Japanese expedition and asserted the Chinese sovereign rights in Taiwan.

On the other hand, Japanese appropriation of international law and the challenges of Qing effective control of aboriginal Taiwan led to the transformation of Qing quarantine doctrine and the abolition of aboriginal boundary policy. History took an ironic twist when the ambitious territorial project of Charles LeGendre and the Meiji government became the impetus of Shen Baozen’s self-strengthening efforts that transformed Taiwan from a quarantine frontier to a sovereign territory of the Qing empire.

The discussion of 1874 Sino-Japanese controversy also indicates the possibility of crossing the historiographical and conceptual divides in Taiwanese history. The introduction of “modern” territorial sovereignty in 1874 took place before the conventional periodization of modern Taiwan in 1895. The linkages between the Japanese and Qing colonial projects problematize the traditional characterization of a “pre-modern Qing vs. modern Japan.” The coexistence and interaction of different territorial conceptions and sovereignty discourses illustrate the convergence of internal and external trends in Taiwan and the contested nature of modern state sovereignty. And finally, the racial and civilizing tone of nineteenth-century international law testifies the centrality and historicity of colonialism in formulating the modern experience of indigenous Taiwanese. In the future, historians of Taiwan will need to explore how the events in 1874-5 affected the lives of the people and the trajectory of colonial modernity on the island.
 

Reference　

http://www.sinica.edu.tw/imh/symposium/abstract/abstract_LungchihChang.pdf