April 23: Triple Intervention, a diplomatic intervention by Russia, Germany, and France to force Japan to relinquish the Liaodong peninsula, which had been ceded to them a few days earlier in the Treaty of Shimonoseki.[2]
Spring: the imperial court orders officials to annihilate the bandits that had been plaguing the border between Shandong and Jiangsu; Shandong officials enlist the help of the Big Sword Society, one of the precursors of the Boxers; the Big Swords become a powerful local player in southwestern Shandong.[3]
November 1: Juye Incident, in which two German Catholic missionaries of the Society of the Divine Word are killed by a small band of armed men.[4] The killings gave an excuse to the foreign powers to intensify imperialist activity in China and by leading to a scramble for territorial concessions and eventually the Boxer Uprising of 1899, "set off a chain of events which radically altered the course of Chinese history."[5]
November 14: taking the pretext of the Juye Incident (see previous entry), Germany sends its fleet to seize Jiaozhou Bay on the southern coast of Shandong and forces the Qing government to lease it to Germany for 25 years; the German move triggers a "scramble for concessions" in which other powers also secure their own sphere of influence in China.
January: In a formal diplomatic settlement signed by China under strong pressure from Germany after the Juye Incident of November 1897, China is forced to agree to the "erection of cathedrals, at its own expense, in the village where the missionaries were killed ans two other places, with signs to be posted at the cathedral entrtances stating: 'Catholic church constructed by imperial order'" (Cohen 21). More than a half dozen local officials are dismissed, impeached, or transfered, and even "the conservative but honest" Shandong governor Li Bingheng is demoted and removed from his post (Cohen 20-21)
March: as a counterbalance to the German seizing of Jiazhou Bay a few months earlier, Russia also uses gunboat diplomacy to obtain a long-term lease on Port Arthur at the tip of the strategically and economically important Liaodong peninsula
June 11: the Guangxu Emperor launches a series of sweeping institutional reforms designed to help China modernize urgently after its defeat in the Sino-Japanese War (1895) and the "scramble for concessions" (1897-98) that was threatening the empire's territorial integrity
September 21: a coup led by conservatives at court puts an end to the reform movement 104 days after it started; the movement will become known as the Hundred Days' Reform; the emperor is put under house arrest, after which Empress Dowager Cixi dominates policy-making until her death in 1908.
