From the multilateral military intervention to quell the so-called Boxer Rebellion through to the Geneva Conference of mid 1954, the Great Powers sought to impose political order on an Asia Pacific they saw as chaotic and conflict-prone.

However, implicit within this reordering were relationships between Great Powers themselves. This period in international history was ultimately defined by the combination of Chinese weakness and instability and Great Power attempts to ‘manage’ that situation.

From that starting point, this conference aims to evaluate grand strategies pursued by Great Powers — including the British Empire, France, the United States of America, Russia/Soviet Union, and especially China and Japan — to try to manage not only the region but also each other, and to consider the impact all this had on regional and global states systems and orde