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Series of treaties signed by China, Japan, or Korea

Unequal treaties refer to a series of treaties signed during the 19th and early 20th centuries, between China (mostly the Qing dynasty) and various foreign powers (including, but not limited to, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the United States, Russia, and Japan). The agreements, often reached after a military defeat or a threat of military invasion, contained one sided terms, requiring China to cede land, pay reparations, open treaty ports, give up tariff autonomy, legalise opium import, and grant extraterritorial privileges to foreign citizens. With the rise of Chinese nationalism and anti imperialism in the 1920s, both the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party used the concept to characterize the Chinese experience of losing sovereignty between roughly 1840 to 1950. The term "unequal treaty" became associated with the concept of China's "century of humiliation", especially the concessions to foreign powers and the loss of tariff autonomy through treaty ports. Japanese and Koreans also use the term to refer to several treaties that resulted in the loss of their sovereignty, to varying degrees. Japan and Qing China also signed treaties with Korea like the Japan–Korea Treaty of 1876 and China–Korea Treaty of 1882, which granted some extent of privileges to Japan and China, respectively.

In China, the term "unequal treaty" first came into use in the early 1920s to describe the historical treaties, still imposed on the then Republic of China, that were signed through the period of time which the American sinologist John K. Fairbank characterized as the "treaty century" which began in the 1840s. The term was popularized by Sun Yat sen. In assessing the term's usage in rhetorical discourse since the early 20th century, American historian Dong Wang notes that "while the phrase has long been widely used, it nevertheless lacks a clear and unambiguous meaning" and that there is "no agreement about the actual number of treaties signed between China and foreign countries that should be counted as unequal." The earliest treaty later referred to as "unequal" was the 1841 Convention of Chuenpi negotiations during the First Opium War. The first treaty between China and the United Kingdom termed "unequal" was the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842. Under the treaties, the UK and the US established the British Supreme Court for China and Japan and United States Court for China in Shanghai.

After World War I, patriotic consciousness in China focused on the treaties, which now became widely known as "unequal treaties." The Nationalist Party and the Communist Party competed to convince the public that their approach would be more effective. After Chiang Kai shek declared a new national government in 1927, the Western powers quickly offered diplomatic recognition, arousing anxiety in Japan.

After the Boxer Rebellion and the signing of the Anglo Japanese Alliance of 1902, Germany began to reassess its policy approach towards China. In 1907 Germany suggested a trilateral German Chinese American agreement that never materialised. Thus China entered the new era of ending unequal treaties on March 14, 1917, when it broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, thereby terminating the concessions it had given that country, with China declaring war on Germany on August 17, 1917. As World War I commenced, these acts voided the unequal treaty of 1861, resulting in the reinstatement of Chinese control on the concessions of Tianjin and Hankou to China. In 1919, the post war peace negotiations failed to return the territories in Shandong, previously under German colonial control, back to the Republic of China. After it was determined that the Japanese forces occupying those territories since 1914 would be allowed to retain them under the Treaty of Versailles, the Chinese delegate Wellington Koo refused to sign the peace agreement, with China being the only conference member to boycott the signing ceremony. Widely perceived in China as a betrayal of the country's wartime contributions by the other conference members, the domestic backlash following the failure to restore Shandong would cause the collapse of the cabinet of the Duan Qirui government and lead to the May 4th movement. On May 20, 1921, China secured with the German Chinese peace treaty (Deutsch chinesischer Vertrag zur Wiederherstellung des Friedenszustandes) a diplomatic accord which was considered the first equal treaty between China and a European nation. This event abruptly terminated Japan's 220 years of seclusion under the Sakoku policy of 1633 under unilateral foreign pressure and consequentially, the convention has been seen in a similar light as an unequal treaty. Another significant incident was the Tokugawa Shogunate's capitulation to the Harris Treaty of 1858, negotiated by the eponymous U. S. envoy Townsend Harris, which, among other concessions, established a system of extraterritoriality for foreign residents. This agreement would then serve as a model for similar treaties to be further signed by Japan with other foreign Western powers in the weeks to follow. The enforcement of these unequal treaties were a tremendous national shock for Japan's leadership as they both curtailed Japanese sovereignty for the first time in its history and also revealed the nation's growing weakness relative to the West through the latter's successful imposition of such agreements upon the island nation. An objective towards the recovery of national status and strength would become an overarching priority for Japan, with the treaty's domestic consequences being the end of the Bakufu, the 700 years of shogunate rule over Japan, and the establishment of a new imperial government. The unequal treaties ended at various times for the countries involved and Japan's victories in the 1894–95 First Sino Japanese War convinced many in the West that unequal treaties could no longer be enforced on Japan.

Korea's first unequal treaty was not with the West, but instead with Japan. The Ganghwa Island incident in 1875 saw Japan send the warship Un'yō led by Captain Inoue Yoshika with the implied threat of military action to coerce the Korean kingdom of Joseon through the show of force. After an armed clash ensued around Ganghwa Island where the Japanese force was sent, which resulted in its victory, the incident subsequently forced Korea to open its doors to Japan by signing the Treaty of Ganghwa Island, also known as the Japan–Korea Treaty of 1876. During this period Korea also signed treaties with Qing China and the West powers (such as the United Kingdom and the United States). In the case of Qing China, it signed the China–Korea Treaty of 1882 with Korea stipulating that Korea was a dependency of China and granted the Chinese extraterritoriality and other privileges, and in subsequent treaties China also obtained concessions in Korea, notably the Chinese concession of Incheon. However, Qing China lost its influence over Korea following the First Sino Japanese War in 1895. As Japanese dominance over the Korean peninsula grew in the following decades, with respect to the unequal treaties imposed upon the kingdom by the West powers, Korea's diplomatic concessions with those states became largely null and void in 1910, when it was annexed by Japan.

In 2018, Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad criticized the terms of the bilateral infrastructure projects under the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative in Malaysia and urged the Chinese negotiators to reassess them through invoking the historical memory of China's unequal treaties. Stating that "they know that when they lend big sums of money to a poor country, in the end they may have to take the project for themselves". He appealed by stating that "China knows very well that it had to deal with unequal treaties in the past imposed upon China by Western powers. So China should be sympathetic toward us. They know we cannot afford this."