PARIS 1919 (59 page)

The Japanese government had been conciliatory, offering to limit emigration, but it was under pressure from its own public opinion. In 1913, twenty thousand Japanese cheered when a speaker pronounced that Japan should go to war rather than accept the California laws on land ownership. In 1916 the government sent what was by Japanese standards a blunt message to Britain: “a general feeling of regret is prevalent in the Imperial Diet that anti-Japanese feeling is still strong in British colonies.” As Japan prepared to take its place at the Peace Conference, Japanese newspapers were full of exhortations. “Now is the time,” said one editorial, “to fight against international racial discrimination.”
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Senior statesmen warned the government that Japan should approach the proposed League of Nations with great caution. What if it was simply another way to freeze the status quo and keep Japan in the second rank? Even Wilson's promises of a new diplomacy were suspect. Democracy and humanitarianism were nice sentiments, wrote a young patriot in an article that caused a considerable stir, but they were simply a cloak for the United States and Britain to maintain their control over most of the world's wealth. If Japan was to survive, wrote its author, Prince Fumimaro Konoe, it might have to be more aggressive. The Japanese delegation was dispatched to Paris with instructions to delay the creation of the League, and, if that were not possible, to make sure that the League's covenant contained a prohibition on racial discrimination. Konoe went along as an aide to Saionji. Years later he was to be Japan's prime minister when his country slid toward war with the United States. In 1945 he drank poison before he could be tried for war crimes.
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Since Wilson insisted that the League be the first item of business at the Peace Conference, the Japanese delegates worked quietly behind the scenes for the racial equality clause. At the start of February, Makino and Chinda called on House, who was, as usual, encouraging and friendly. He had always, he said, hated racial prejudice and would do his best to help them. When House met with Balfour a couple of days later, he was less optimistic. The British envoy had tried several different formulas but the difficulty was that the Japanese did not want completely anodyne wording, while for others—the Australians, for example—any mention of racial equality was unacceptable. Balfour was his usual detached self: the notion that all men were created equal was an interesting one, he found, but he did not believe it. You could scarcely say that a man in Central Africa was equal to a European. He also warned House that people in the United States and the British empire were seeing the proposed clause as a first step to outlawing restrictions on Japanese immigration. He was aware of this, House replied, but Japan did have a problem of overpopulation. Perhaps, he added hopefully, they could all go to Siberia—or Brazil.
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In the Commission on the League of Nations, Makino and Chinda discreetly let it be known that they were working on a clause that they would, in due course, bring forward. On February 13, as the first draft of the covenant was being readied, Makino read out a long statement. He wished to amend the “religious liberty” clause, which included a promise by League members not to discriminate against anyone within their jurisdiction on the basis of creed, religion or belief. He read his amendment:

The equality of nations being a basic principle of the League of Nations, the High Contracting Parties agree to accord, as soon as possible, to all alien nationals of States members of the League equal and just treatment in every respect, making no distinction, either in law or in fact, on account of their race or nationality.

Makino recognized that racial prejudice ran deep, but the important thing was to get the principle accepted and then let individual nations work out their own policies. The League, he went on, would be a great family of nations. They were all going to look out for each other. It was surely unreasonable to ask nationals of one country to make sacrifices, perhaps even give up their lives, for people who did not treat them as equals. In the Great War, different races had fought side by side: “A common bond of sympathy and gratitude has been established to an extent never before experienced.”

It was a moving and liberal statement, and it made absolutely no difference. Cecil, speaking for Britain, said that, alas, this was a highly controversial matter. It was already causing problems within the British empire delegation. He thought that it would be better to postpone the whole matter to a future date. There was a general murmur of agreement. Perhaps, Venizelos suggested helpfully, they should drop the whole clause on religious liberty, since that was also a tricky subject. This brought a solitary objection from the Portuguese delegate, who said that his government had never yet signed a treaty that did not call on God. Cecil, in a rare moment of humor, replied that this time they would all have to take a chance. There was no mention of racial or religious equality in the draft which now went forward to a full meeting of the Peace Conference for discussion. The Japanese made it clear that they intended to raise the issue again.
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The next day, February 14, Wilson left for the United States, and the League was put to one side.

The racial equality clause, however, was starting to catch public attention. In Japan there were public meetings and demands to end “the badge of shame.” Along the West Coast of the United States political leaders warned of the serious consequences to the white race if the clause passed. The clause, Lloyd George said, repeating another common misunderstanding, was also aimed at the discrimination suffered by Japanese who were already living in places such as Australia and the United States.
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The Japanese had, at best, lukewarm support in Paris. The Chinese, whose nationals suffered from similar discrimination, felt they would probably vote for the clause but, as one Chinese delegate told an American, they had much more important things to worry about—in particular, Japan's claims in China. Wilson had to worry about opinion at home, and he was becoming suspicious of the Japanese. Although he had trusted them before, he told one of his experts, “in fact they had broken their agreement about Siberia.” Moreover, Wilson himself was not especially enlightened when it came to race. He was a Southerner, after all, and although he had appealed for black votes in his first campaign for the presidency, he had done little for blacks once in office and had refused to allow black combat troops to fight alongside white Americans in the war, preferring to place them under French command.
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The loudest opposition to the racial equality clause came from the British empire delegation, in particular from Billy Hughes. Like many of his compatriots, Hughes firmly believed that the clause was the first breach in the dike protecting Australia. “No Govt. could live for a day in Australia if it tampered with a White Australia,” wrote one of his subordinates from Paris. “The position is this—either the Japanese proposal means something or it means nothing: if the former, out with it; if the latter—why have it?” Hughes refused to accept any of the compromises House came up with. “It may be all right,” he scribbled on one attempt. “But sooner than agree to it I would walk into the Seine—or the Folies Bergeres—with my clothes off.” Massey of New Zealand followed in Hughes's wake.
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This put the British in an awkward position. They wanted very much to maintain the alliance with Japan but, yet again, they had to pay attention to their dominions.

While Wilson was away in the United States, the British did their best to resolve the issue. The French, who had nothing at stake, watched with amusement. Borden and Smuts went back and forth between Hughes and the Japanese delegation. They arranged for Makino and Chinda to call on Hughes. (Saionji remained, as always, in the background.) The Japanese thought Hughes “a peasant”; he complained that they had been “beslobbering me with genuflexions and obsequious deference.” The Australian allowed that he might accept the clause if it contained a proviso that it did not affect national immigration policies. It was the turn of the Japanese to refuse. Makino and Chinda appealed to House repeatedly for help, but they were looking in the wrong quarter. House was not prepared to fight for something that was bound to be unpopular in the United States. Privately, he was delighted that the British were taking the heat. “It has taken considerable finesse to lift the load from our shoulders and place it upon the British, but happily, it has been done.”
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The Japanese delegates, under pressure from Tokyo, decided to go ahead with the clause. As Chinda told House, a defeat would at least show their own public that they had tried. On April 10, at a meeting of the Commission on the League of Nations, the Japanese let it be known that they would be introducing their amendment the next day. They had put it off so often, said House's son-in-law Gordon Auchincloss, that it had become something of a joke. On April 11, the commission met until late in the evening, trying to come up with a formula that would allow the United States to keep the Monroe Doctrine and join the League. Everyone was exhausted when the Japanese finally moved that a reference to racial equality be included in the preamble to the covenant. They had by now watered down their original proposal so that the clause would simply ask for “the principle of equality of nations and just treatment of their nationals.” Makino and Chinda both spoke moderately and calmly. They made a very good impression. One by one the other delegates on the commission— Venizelos, Orlando, Wellington Koo from China, the French delegates, Bourgeois and Larnaude, and the Czech prime minister—spoke in favor of the amendment. Looking extremely uncomfortable, Cecil said briefly that he could not support it, then sat glumly with downcast eyes.

While the others were speaking, House slipped a note to Wilson, who was chairing the meeting: “The trouble is that if this Commission should pass it, it would surely raise the race issue throughout the world.” Wilson knew that any reference to racial equality would alienate key politicians on the West Coast, and he needed their votes to get the League through Congress. He urged the Japanese to withdraw their amendment. It was a mistake, he said, to make too much fuss about racial prejudice. That would only stir up flames that would eventually hurt the League. Everyone in the room knew that the League was based on the equality of nations. There was no need to say anything more. He was speaking in the most friendly possible manner to the Japanese. He knew that they meant well, but he felt that he had to warn them that they were going about things the wrong way.

The Japanese delegates insisted on a vote. When a majority voted for the amendment, Wilson, with the dexterity he had no doubt learned as a university president, announced that because there were strong objections to the amendment it could not carry. The Japanese chose not to challenge this dubious ruling and so the racial equality clause did not become part of the covenant.
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The Japanese press was bitterly critical of the “so-called civilized world.” Liberal, internationally minded Japanese were dismayed. They had played the game, they had shown themselves ready to participate in the international community, and yet they were still treated as inferiors. If nations were denied just and equal treatment, Makino warned a plenary session of the Peace Conference on April 28, they might well lose faith in the principles that guided the League: “Such a frame of mind, I am afraid, would be most detrimental to that harmony and co-operation, upon which foundation alone can the League now contemplated be securely built.” He was right. The failure to get the racial equality clause was an important factor in the interwar years in turning Japan away from cooperation with the West and toward more aggressively nationalistic policies.
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In the short term, however, Japan was able to use its defeat to its advantage. “The Japanese told me with all oriental courtesy,” Wilson reported to his fellow peacemakers toward the end of April, “that, if we didn't take their side on this article of the treaty, they couldn't sign the rest.” Lloyd George appeared unperturbed. “Dear! Dear!” Clemenceau added, “If that doesn't bother you any more than that, I can't seem to be more bothered than you.” In fact, they were all worried. The conference could not afford another defection. Wilson, desperate to save the League of Nations but unable to accept the racial equality clause, now faced giving Japan what it wanted in China. What made his position difficult was that China also had a strong case.
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24

A Dagger Pointed at the Heart of China

WHEN THE NEWS that the Great War was over reached China, the government declared a three-day holiday. Sixty thousand people, many of them nationalist students and their teachers, turned out for Peking's victory parade. To popular rejoicing, a monument put up by the kaiser's government to a German diplomat who had been killed during the Boxer Rebellion two decades earlier was torn down. The Chinese press was full of articles about the triumph of democracy over despotism and of enthusiasm for Wilson's Fourteen Points. Among young Chinese especially, there was an uncritical admiration for Western democracy, Western liberal ideals and Western learning. Many Chinese also hoped that the peace would bring an end to interference by the Great Powers in China's affairs.

China had declared war on Germany in the summer of 1917 and had made a substantial contribution to the Allied victory. The trenches of the Western Front required an enormous amount of digging and maintenance. By 1918 about 100,000 Chinese laborers had been shipped to France, where they freed valuable Allied soldiers to press the attack against the Germans. Many Chinese died in France, through shells or disease. More than five hundred were drowned when German submarines sank a French ship in the Mediterranean.

It was easier for China to find laborers for the war effort than experienced diplomats for the peace. Peking stripped its Foreign Ministry of its best talent, calling on its ambassadors from Washington, Brussels and London and the foreign minister. The delegation did not include either China's president or its prime minister, mainly because the political situation in China was so precarious that neither dared to leave. It did, however, hire several foreign advisers who were supposed to help explain China to the world and vice versa. (The American government, hoping to be the honest broker in Paris, would not let any of its nationals work for the Chinese—at least not officially.)

The group of some sixty Chinese and their five foreign advisers that finally assembled in Paris at the Hôtel Lutétia epitomized China itself, balanced uneasily between the old and the new, the north and the south, and with a strong hint of outside influence. It was not clear what they represented, for China was falling to pieces. While one set of soldiers and their supporters controlled the capital, Peking, and the north of China, another had proclaimed an independent government in the south, at Canton. Even as the Paris Peace Conference met, another peace conference was being held at Shanghai to try and reconcile the two governments. The delegation in Paris had been chosen by both sides and its members did not trust each other or their nominal government back in Peking.

Its leader, Lu Zhengxiang, a man in his late forties, epitomized how China was changing. He came from Shanghai, the great port which had grown under the stimulus of Western trade and investment. His father, a Christian, worked for foreign missionaries and sent him to Western-style schools, where he learned foreign languages, not the Chinese classics that so many generations of Chinese boys had studied.
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Such men were anathema to the older generation of scholars (the mandarins, the West called them), who for centuries had run China. The minds of such scholars were subtle beyond the comprehension of most Westerners; their self-control and manners were impeccable. Their predecessors had governed China for centuries, but all their skills were no match for the guns and steamships of an aggressive West.

Lu had grown up at a time when the old civilization was fighting a losing battle against the forces of change. For centuries, China had run its own affairs in its own way. The Chinese called their country the Middle Kingdom—“middle” not in importance but because it was at the center of the known world. When the first Westerners—“long-nosed hairy barbarians”—had begun to appear in China's gaze, they made no more impression than a gnat might on an elephant. But in the nineteenth century the periphery had begun to disturb the center, selling opium, intruding through its traders, its missionaries and its ideas. The Chinese had resisted, bringing upon themselves a long series of defeats. By the end of the century, China's government had lost control of its own finances and tariffs, and China was dotted with foreign enclaves, ports, railways, factories and mines, and the foreign troops to guard them. The Great Powers threw the cloak of extraterritoriality around their subjects on the grounds that Chinese laws and Chinese judges were too primitive to deal with the products of Western civilization. It was even said that the sign at the entrance to the park in the foreign concession area of Shanghai read, “No dogs. No Chinese.” The Chinese have been trying to deal with the awful blows to their self-esteem and their established world order ever since.

As an eminent Chinese thinker famously asked, “Why are they small and yet strong? Why are we large and yet weak?” Gradually, for it was not easy to jettison the habits of two thousand years, the Chinese began to learn from the foreigners, sending students abroad and hiring foreign experts. New ideas and new techniques were already seeping in, through the missionaries who opened up colleges and schools, via the businessmen who settled in the big ports such as Canton and Shanghai, and from the increasing numbers of Chinese who went abroad to make their fortunes and came back to look for wives and to be buried.

Lu had the new sort of learning that China needed if it was to survive. He entered the diplomatic service, itself an innovation, and spent many of the years before the Great War in one European capital or another. He caused something of a scandal, first by marrying a Belgian woman, then by cutting his long pigtail. He also espoused increasingly radical views, blaming the dynasty for China's problems and arguing for a republic.

China's situation was grim. Foreign nationals were staking out their spheres of influence: the Russians in the north, the British in the Yangtze valley (the Yangtze ran for 3,500 miles from the China Sea to Tibet), the French in the south, the Germans in the Shantung peninsula—and the Japanese here, there and everywhere. The Americans, who did not join in—partly, said the cynics, because they did not have the resources— talked idealistically about an open door through which everyone could exploit the Chinese equally. The danger, as Chinese nationalists saw clearly, was that China would simply be carved up and the Chinese nation and what was left of Chinese civilization would disappear. If not for the fact that there was a standoff among the powers over how to do the carving, this might well have happened by the time of the Great War.

Fear stimulated the growth of modern Chinese nationalism. Terms such as “sovereign rights” and “nation” began to make their way into the Chinese language, which had never needed them before. Plays and songs told of a sleeping China awakening and sending its tormentors packing. Radicals formed shadowy and usually evanescent secret societies to overthrow the ruling dynasty, now seen as an obstacle to China's salvation. The first boycotts of goods produced by China's enemies, and the first demonstrations, began to shake China's great cities after 1900. There was a rash of patriotic suicides. These were tactics born of weakness, not of strength, but they showed the first stirrings of a powerful force. The Chinese increasingly settled on Japan as their major enemy.

In 1911 Lu and the other nationalists got part of their wish when a bloodless revolution toppled the last emperor, an eight-year-old boy. China became a republic mainly because modern institutions seemed necessary for dealing with the modern world. Few Chinese outside the cities had the slightest idea what a republic was. In the inland towns and villages, many did not even know that the dynasty had gone. (Indeed, a Red Guard who was sent out to the backwoods in the 1960s was startled to be asked by local farmers, “Tell us, who sits on the Dragon Throne these days?”)

Lu served the new republic loyally as both foreign minister and prime minister. There were some hopeful signs. China's economy was beginning to stir—in the big cities, at any rate, where modern industries were coming to life. As the new knowledge permeated the schools and universities, China began to throw off some of the old repressive ways. Unfortunately China's first president, an imposing general called Yuan Shikai, came from the old conservative world. Within four years of the revolution, he was trying to make himself emperor. Although he died before he could get away with it, he left a deadly inheritance: a divided country, a weak and ineffectual parliament and, most ominous of all, a series of local armies headed by their own generals. China by 1916 was entering a period of internal chaos and warlord rule that was not to end until the late 1920s.

The great Chinese writer Lu Xun compared his countrymen to people sleeping in a house made of iron. The house was on fire and the sleepers would die unless they woke up. But if they did wake, would they be able to get out? Was it better to let them perish in ignorance or die in the full knowledge of their fate? For all their doubts, Lu Xun and the other radical intellectuals of his generation did try to wake China up. They made it their responsibility to speed change by clearing away the debris of the past and forcing the Chinese to look to the future. They published journals with names such as
New Youth
and
New Tide.
They wrote satirical plays and stories scorning tradition. Their prescription for China was summed up in the slogan “Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy”—science to represent reason, and democracy because that was what they thought China needed to bring unity between government and people and thus make China strong. They admired the Allies and hoped that they would treat China fairly, according to the principles Western leaders had so often enunciated during the war. Shantung would be the test.

A hilly, densely populated peninsula that juts into the north Pacific just below Peking, Shantung was as important to China as Alsace-Lorraine to France. It was the birthplace of the great sage Confucius, whose ideas had for so long been part of the glue that held China together. (Even today, some twenty-six centuries after his birth, there are families in Shantung who claim to be his descendants.) Whoever held Shantung not only commanded the southern flank of Peking but also menaced the Yellow River and the Grand Canal which helped link north and south China. For Westerners, its name was synonymous with a popular soft silk fabric which was made there and, in more recent and horrifying memory, with the base from which the longhaired Boxer rebels had come with their mission of extirpating all Westerners and all Western influence from China.

It was inevitable that Shantung would attract the interest of outside powers during the general scramble for concessions and influence in China. Its population of some thirty million offered markets and cheap labor. It had coal and other mineral deposits that were crying out to be exploited. When the German traveler Ferdinand von Richthofen called the attention of his kaiser and the German navy to the fact that it possessed one of the finest natural harbors on the China coast—at Kiachow (Jiaozhou) on the south side of the peninsula—they listened with interest. Germany was on a search for world power, and in those days that meant colonies and bases. Providentially, two German missionaries were killed in local disturbances in 1897. “A splendid opportunity,” said the kaiser, and sent a naval squadron to seize Kiachow. The Chinese government protested ineffectually and in 1898 signed an agreement giving Germany a ninety-nine-year lease on about a hundred square miles of Chinese territory around Kiachow harbor. Germany also got the rights to build railways, to open mines and to station German troops to protect its interests.

The German government lavished money on its new possession, far more than it spent on any of its much larger African colonies. It enticed German business, which was curiously reluctant to invest in Shantung, to build a railway and dig mines. (None ever showed a profit.) The navy took charge of the new port at Kiachow. Tsingtao (Qingdao), as it was known, was a model development with superb modern harbor facilities, neatly laid-out paved streets, piped water and sewage, an up-to-date telephone network, German schools, hospitals, and even a brewery that made excellent German beer, as it still does today. One admiring foreign visitor called Tsingtao “the Brighton of the East.” By 1907 it was the seventh most important port in China. The only drawback was that it was many thousands of miles from the nearest German colonies and from Germany itself.
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For all the bluster with which the kaiser had demanded concessions in Shantung, the German government showed considerable tact in the years before 1914 in dealing with the Chinese authorities. It allowed Chinese troops to guard its railway line and mines when it could have insisted on its own soldiers; it gave up the right to build other lines; and it let Tsingtao become part of the Chinese customs system rather than keeping it as a free port. The result was that by 1914 German concessions were much more limited than they had been under the agreement of 1898 and Sino-German relations were relatively amicable. That fact did not help Germany when war broke out. The German chargé d'affaires in China sent a cable to Berlin saying “Engagement with Miss Butterfly very probable”— a message that the British, who were reading all the cables coming from the East, did not have much trouble decoding. The Chinese government was not in a position to intervene when Japan attacked, and there was nothing Germany itself could do. The kaiser had only his sympathy to spare: “God be with you! In the coming struggle I will think of you.” And so the German concessions in Shantung, the railway, the neat little port and the mines passed into Japan's control.
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Japan talked about handing back the concessions to China, but the Chinese, not surprisingly, did not put much faith in this. During the war, Japan did what it could to ensure that it would hang on to its acquisition. Right from the start the occupation authorities had busied themselves building new railways, taking over the running of the telegraphs and the post office from the Chinese, and extracting taxes and labor from the local inhabitants. Japan achieved control of Shantung beyond anything Germany had enjoyed.
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