As most of the Chinese were from the Ningbo region in northern Zhejiang, the Ningbo traders organized in 1880 their own "Three Rivers Association" for trade. Well funded with Chinese capital, they maintained close links with Shanghai wholesale dealers and made good use of consumer preferences in the interior markets of China. Only 1% of the total number of marine products shipped by British vessels from Japan to China was consumed in Shanghai; the rest was distributed by Yangtze River shipping onto Hong Kong and Tianjin whence it entered China.

     In contrast, by the close of the nineteenth century Japanese exports of Japanese marine products to China had suffered repeated failures. Japanese traders of such Japanese products held only 10% of the Chinese share of the trade. They formed unions of producers, brokers, consignees, and exporters, and also created a government-sponsored company to secure their direct collection, shipping, and sale of Japanese products to China. These three attempts-Honin-sha from 1872 to 1874, Kogyo-shokai from 1876 to 1885, and Nihon-Konbu-Kaisha from 1889 to 1894-ended up abortive failures. Change came when the newly established Agency of Hokkaido in 1886 made a systematic research of the Chinese market and the Japan Mailing Steamer Co. Was set up and the various unions were integrated under the umbrella of the Chambers of Commerce at Hakodate. Further progress was achieved with the extension of her fishing rights far into the Saharin and Kuril islands and off the Kamchatka Peninsula and the modernization of fishery by deep sea fishery. Nevertheless, Chinese merchants of marine products could withstand these Japanese efforts inside Japan to survive in Hakkodate for another few decades.

Where then, in this world of Japanese, Chinese, and now Indian trade, does the West come in. If its control over manufacturing was beginning to weaken from the late nineteenth century, the same could not be said of capital goods and capital. Japan's expansion into the China market in the early twentieth century coincided with a string of trade deficits due to its import of capital goods. In the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, that meant huge military imports like steamships, coal, blankets, cotton piece goods, locomotives, and machinery, primarily from Britain. After Japan's success in this war, the export of British capital goods to Japan once again rose. In the field of cotton textile machinery, the British share reached 52% in 1907. By 1913, however, the British noted a change: "there has been some solid development on the part of Japanese machinery makers... They are somewhat inferior, lighter and cheaper than imported goods, but they suit the market." They suited the domestic market so well that by the 1920s they dominated the Japanese mills and were being exported to textile mills in China.