In addition to this neighborly example, the Japanese had another source, commonly ignored in current Western comment on the Far East, on which to draw: the quasi-familist Confucian international system which prevailed down to the time of men now living. Successive Chinese Empires developed a clear, viable scheme of senior-junior relationships controlling their intercourse with other organized governments. The other, smaller states acknowledged China to be the senior realm, conceding that the Chinese Emperor was lord of the world. They paid formal tribute to China; their envoys were not ambassadors but tributary agents, while Chinese envoys came as high commissioners, superior in rank to the courts to which they were accredited. This relationship (awkwardly termed "dependency," "vassalage," "tributary" status, or subjection to "suzerainty," in Western terms) could not be fitted into the Western state system. Involving the assertion of Chinese power without concurrent admission of Chinese responsibility, it was rejected by the Western states, and lapsed following the French seizure of Indo-China, the British occupation of Burma, and Korean independence under Japanese compulsion. Today, Japan's moral effusions concerning the New Order in East Asia and her digressions from Western patterns of international law in dealing with Manchoukuo and Wang Ch'ing-wei both indicate that the Japanese move freely, sincerely, and unconsciously in a frame of reference which, obvious to them, is invisible to Westerners. The Japan-Manchoukuo or Japan-Wang relationship could be aligned with the relationship which Li Hung-chang wished, sixty years ago, to maintain in Korea, and found significantly similar. The Japanese understood the position of juniority in international relations: to their intense humiliation, they confessed themselves China's junior during the Ashikaga period.[3]