While Mishra's book has been generally well-received by academics and popular reviewers alike from what I've read, it is worth noting that none of the reviews I read came from China scholars, who may have taken umbrage both with Misra's rather pan-Asianist stance and with his focus on biographing emigré radicals like Sun Yat-Sen and Liang Qichao, rather than really digging into their relationship with domestic radicals like the Hubei students and New Army recruits, or the reformist members of the old guard like Li Yuanhong and Yuan Shikai who ultimately profited from the Republican Revolution. Indeed, this is a criticism that could be made more generally – is Mishra overstating the degree to which there was a broad 'Asian' undercurrent of change in the decades either side of 1900, given the markedly distinct political contexts of Turkey, India and China, and does his emphasis on intellectual figures misdirect attention away from distinct popular interests?

I'm not unwilling to accept that Sun Yat-Sen and Liang Qichao would have been quite keen on the Japanese victory – indeed I'd be surprised if they weren't – but not because ideas of Pan-Asianism were predominant across Chinese society. Rather, their particular circumstances would have made them more elated by Japanese success.

From a pragmatic standpoint, both men were exiles from China thanks to their involvement in various anti-Qing activities – Sun thanks to his involvement in failed coups in Guangdong in 1895 and 1900 (to the point where he was officially exiled from British Hong Kong after 1895 and so held meetings on a ship whenever he was back) and Liang thanks to his involvement in the quashed reform campaign of 1898. With Japan being the main refuge for Chinese political fugitives, who were able to freely publish newspapers and essays and remotely coordinate revolutionary activities, it would have been strategically imprudent to disparage Japan before the establishment of a new regime in China. Moreover, from a personal standpoint, the emigré radicals had close Japanese friends and associates – indeed Sun Yat-Sen's second wife was Japanese – which would have helped further skew their view in Japan's favour. Moreover, Japan was to some extent seen as a useful ally, and Sun on one occasion floated the idea of ceding Manchuria to Japan in exchange for Japanese support in his planned revolution.

From the perspective of principles and ideology, Japan was generally seen as a model of successful adoption of Western modernity by an East Asian power, and the 1905 victory over Russia appeared to affirm this perception. In Hong Kong, Sun saw on a civic scale what Western modernisation could do for China, and in Japan he saw it on a national scale. His own writings reveal a great sense not so much of envy toward Japan as disappointment in China at the disparity in wealth and power between the two. The constitutionalist faction of Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao looked to Japan as a model for their proposed transformation of China in 1898, not least because in Japan was found an example of radical social and political reform without the total ejection of the existing monarchy.

But there are plenty of good reasons to call Sun and Liang outliers. Being well-travelled, Western-educated and, most importantly, relatively well-off, their perspective was a distinct one from the Chinese public at large, which tended to concern itself with regional interests over national ones until the close of the 1910s. Sun emphatically rejected the Boxers as being rural and backward, with no understanding of the modern world (additionally, as a Christian convert, Sun would have been one of their biggest targets.) Sun's own revolutionary party was generally distrusted, and organic regional uprisings, even in the Tongmenghui hotbed of Guangdong, tended to avoid cooperating with revolutionary cells. The appreciation of the implications of Japanese success was a common one, but, particularly within China, exultation was not broadly the order of the day in 1905.

The idea of 'National Humiliation' was sparked ten years earlier with China's defeat to Japan, and most people in China would have remembered it well, with the loss of the old vassal of Korea and of the island of Taiwan. The Treaty of Shimonoseki saw the opening of four inland treaty ports on the Yangtze River, and the Scramble for Concessions which followed saw several coastal cities being leased to foreign powers. Public outrage was vast, and provided the impetus for the failed Hundred Days' Reform of 1898. Japan was also the largest contributor of troops to the relief expedition to Peking in 1900 and the recipient of the fifth-largest share of the Boxer Idemnity payments (7.73% of the total). While it would have been easy for an exiled intellectual with ulterior motives to sing the praises of Japan's victory over Russia, those within China would not have forgotten their enmities so easily. The fact is that most of the war was fought on Qing soil in Manchuria, and largely over those concessions that Russia had obtained from China following the Japanese victory in 1895, and while outright civilian casualties were light, many Chinese labourers in Manchuria were essentially pressed into work as porters in order to sustain the two armies' logistics. In essence, even if there were those happy about Japan's victory, it did not necessarily translate to pro-Japan sentiment.

Even if we were to grant that there was broad Chinese elation over the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, it was only temporary. There was huge public outcry over the content of Japan's secret Twenty-One Demands to President Yuan Shikai in 1915 (one biographer of Yuan suggests that he may have intentionally leaked the demands to the press in order to use public opinion to his advantage), and China's complete snubbing in favour of Japan at the Paris Peace Conference sparked the radical May Fourth Movement in 1919.

In short, emigré intellectuals like Sun Yat-Sen would generally have been quite pleased with the news of Japanese victory, but it is worth iterating that this was not necessarily the prevailing opinion in China, and that on the whole positive reception of Japanese victory was more to do with the affirmation of the success of Asian adoption of Western 'modernity', rather than the specific geopolitical success of Japan.