China’s Day of Shame - May 7, 1915

On May 7, 1915, the same afternoon the Lusitania was sinking in the Atlantic, Japan delivered an ultimatum to China that would ignite a century of nationalist fury and plant the ideological seeds of the modern Chinese state. Richard Backus explores the Twenty-One Demands: the buried diplomatic crisis that explains why Asia looks the way it does today. Japan was playing by the rules the West had written. China had no allies and no time. And no one was watching.