What does the red mean?

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Ostensibly the Sino-Japanese War was a conflict between Japan and China for dominance over China's tributary, Korea. In reality, it was a Japanese attempt to preempt Russian expansion down the Korean Peninsula to threaten Japan. It was also the first of a two limited wars in pursuit of an overarching policy objective: Japanese policymakers believed that dominance over the Korean Peninsula by any great power would directly threaten their national security. They sought to protect Japan first by expelling China in the Sino-Japanese War and, then a decade later, by expelling Russia from both Korea and southern Manchuria in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905). A quarter of a century later, continuing Russian involvement in China and Japanese perceptions of the threat that this entailed culminated in a second and much longer Sino-Japanese War (1932-45). Although the policy of Russian containment is generally associated with U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War, in reality, from the first Sino-Japanese War to the end of World War II, Japanese policymakers had consistently applied containment to Russia.

This was the European view: A quaint Japan preoccupied with stultifying rules of etiquette instead of the serious pursuits of European powers. In contrast, China, greatly popularized by such Enlightenment philosophers as Voltaire, continued to retain the respect of the West. On the eve of war, the British-owned North-China Herald described China as the “only great Asiatic State that really commands the respect of the Great Powers of the World.”