PARIS 1919 (60 page)

Japan also did its best to tie up the ineffectual Chinese government in legal and other knots. It advanced large amounts of money to China, some of which came suspiciously close to bribes, to induce Chinese officials to support its goals. Private Japanese nationalist groups, factions within the military, and financiers pursued their own goals, often at cross-purposes to their own government. Arms went to southerners rebelling against the government in Peking, which Japan had recognized. In south Manchuria and the adjoining part of eastern Mongolia, the Japanese military authorities and adventurers intrigued with rebellious warlords. The consequence was that Japanese policy in China appeared extraordinarily devious when in fact it was more often simply confused and incoherent.

At an official level, successive Japanese governments tried, rather clumsily, to get China under their control. In January 1915, the Japanese minister in Peking paid a courtesy call on China's president. The minister talked about the close and friendly relationship of the two peoples over the centuries and said that it would be a shame if outside powers forced them apart. There were, he added, a few troublesome issues that it would be nice to settle. He then presented the astonished president with a list of twenty-one demands. If China refused to agree to them, Japan might have to take what he vaguely termed “vigorous methods.” Some of the demands simply confirmed Japan's existing activities in China, but another set asked the Chinese government to agree in advance to whatever arrangements Japan and Germany should come to over the German concessions. Worse still was a final, secret set which would have virtually turned China into a Japanese protectorate. ( Just in case the Chinese government had second thoughts, the paper on which the Japanese presented their list had a watermark of dreadnoughts and machine guns.
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The Chinese government stalled and quibbled on every point. It also leaked the demands, which produced nationalist protests throughout China. Japan reluctantly dropped the more drastic provisions but on May 25, 1915, forced the Chinese government to sign a treaty guaranteeing that Japan would get what it wanted in Shantung. The Chinese nationalists declared National Humiliation Day. In Tokyo, Saionji was so distressed at the blundering incompetence of his own government that he made his displeasure felt by blocking the foreign minister's attempt to become prime minister.
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Other nations watched with concern but did little. Britain badly needed Japan's help at sea. Japanese ships were already carrying out patrols in the Pacific, and the British hoped they might do the same for the route around the Cape of Good Hope and perhaps even in the Mediterranean.
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France and Italy were content to follow the British, and Russia, which was taking terrible losses in Europe, had no desire to antagonize its powerful neighbor in the Far East. In its secret agreements of 1917 with Britain, France and Italy, Japan was assured support for its continued possession of the German possessions and privileges in Shantung.

The one power to object openly to Japan's activities in China was the United States, which was increasingly worried about Japan's growing power in the Pacific and on the mainland of Asia. Even before what Wilson called “the whole suspicious affair” of the Twenty-one Demands, there had been friction over such issues as the American navy's demand for a coaling station on the China coast and the high rates that the Japanese-run railway in Manchuria was charging for American goods.
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American businessmen complained that Japanese competition was driving them out of the China market. During the long-drawn-out negotiations between China and Japan, the American government urged Japan to modify its position; in Peking, the firmly anti-Japanese American ambassador encouraged the Chinese to stand firm. The Americans sent a note to both the Chinese and the Japanese governments saying that it would not accept any agreement that undercut American treaty rights in China or China's own political or territorial integrity. (That reservation became very significant in 1931, when the United States used it as the basis for its objection to Japan's seizure of Manchuria.)

The Japanese government backed down in 1915, but it did not give up trying to establish the upper hand in China. In 1916, it signed a treaty with Russia under which Russia recognized Japan's special position in southern Manchuria and eastern Mongolia. At the same time, it sent Viscount Kikujiro Ishii to Washington to try to get American recognition of Japan's position in China. The talks between Ishii and Lansing resulted in an exchange of notes which each side interpreted to suit itself. The Americans believed they had simply recognized that Japan already had special interests in China because of geography; the Japanese maintained that the Americans had given their approval to Japan's special position in a much wider sense.
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The Russian Revolution of 1917 added to the Japanese determination to stay in China. As Ishii confided to his diary, “While foreign governments would not feel themselves endangered by calamity, epidemic, civil war or bolshevism in China, Japan could not exist without China and the Japanese people could not stand without the Chinese.”
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That was why the Japanese often referred to an “Asian Monroe Doctrine.” Just as the United States for its own security treated Latin America as its backyard, so Japan had to worry about China and neighbors such as Korea and Mongolia.

In 1918, with the war nearly over, Japan made a final effort to get matters in China settled to its satisfaction. In May it signed a defense treaty with the Chinese government, and in September it exchanged secret notes reiterating the 1915 agreements on Shantung. In a phrase that was particularly damaging to China's case in Paris, the Chinese representative in Tokyo said that his government “gladly agreed” to the notes. In other words, the Chinese government compromised its own bargaining position before the war ended. Chinese delegates in Paris claimed that they knew nothing of the secret agreements until they were produced by the Japanese in January 1919.
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By 1919, Japan's maneuverings in China had left a bad impression on many outside observers. Even the British, who were committed to supporting Japan, were worried by what they perceived as Japanese arrogance and ambition. The British were particularly concerned about Japan's inroads into their economic sphere in the Yangtze valley. Their ambassador in Tokyo warned darkly, “Today we have come to know that Japan—the real Japan—is a frankly opportunistic, not to say selfish, country, of very moderate importance compared with the giants of the Great War, but with a very exaggerated opinion of her role in the universe.” The British were further irritated by the way the Japanese press criticized the performance of British soldiers in the taking of the German concessions in China. The problem was that China seemed such a hopeless cause. Curzon, Balfour's successor as foreign secretary, drew a pointed comparison with Japan: “Within sight of their shores you have the great helpless, hopeless, and inert mass of China, one of the most densely populated countries in the world, utterly deficient in cohesion or strength, engaged in perpetual conflict between the North and the South, destitute of military capacity or ardour, an easy prey to a nation of the character I have described.”
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The French, on the China question at least, were in agreement with the British.

House also agreed. As he told Wilson during the war, it was unreasonable not to expect Japan to move into the mainland of China when so much of the white world was closed to the Japanese. “We cannot meet Japan in her desires as to land and immigration, and unless we make some concessions in regard to her sphere of influence in the East, trouble is sure, sooner or later to come.” He added, with excessive optimism, “A policy can be formulated which will leave the door open, rehabilitate China, and satisfy Japan.” The Japanese, when they analyzed the American delegation in Paris, put him down as a friend.
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They could not find many others.

Years later Breckinridge Long, who was third assistant secretary of state with special responsibility for Far Eastern affairs before and during the Paris Peace Conference, told an interviewer that from 1917 onward suspicion of Japan was a constant factor in American thinking. Even Lansing, who prided himself on his reasonable approach to the world, felt the shift. In 1915, he argued for the need to conciliate Japan, even suggesting giving it the Philippines, and criticized people who had “hysterics about the deep and wicked schemes of Japan.” But, as far as China was concerned, he became convinced that a line must be drawn. He sailed to Paris determined, he later said, “to have it out once and for all with Japan.” He also took to referring to Japan as “Prussia,” which was not meant as a compliment.
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As the Peace Conference started, it looked as though Wilson might take the same view. He was against secret treaties such as the ones Japan had made, and against handing out peoples and territories without consideration for their wishes. He was also deeply interested in China, an interest that had been fed by reports from the many American missionaries who worked there. One of his cousins edited a Presbyterian missionary weekly in Shanghai. He spoke of wanting to help China, of its moral regeneration, a task in which the United States stood ready to help as “friend and exemplar.” Wilson's ambassador to Peking, Paul S. Reinsch, a progressive university professor from Wisconsin, showered Washington with accusations, some of which were true, that Japanese in China were stirring up rebellion, selling morphine and bribing officials, all with the aim of dominating the whole of East Asia. “Should Japan be given a freer hand and should anything be done which could be interpreted as a recognition of a special position of Japan,” he warned, “either in the form of a so-called Monroe Doctrine or in any other way, forces will be set in action which make a huge armed conflict absolutely inevitable within one generation. There is no single problem in Europe which equals in its importance to the future peace of the world, the need of a just settlement of Chinese affairs.”
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Wilson appeared to be listening. In 1918, he took the initiative in reviving a moribund multinational consortium for making loans to the Chinese government. Desultory talks dragged on throughout the Peace Conference, with Japan agreeing to enter the consortium while at the same time making sure that it did not lend money for any developments that might weaken its influence. That was just what the Americans hoped to do. “No mention was made,” said a senior American official, “of
the ultimate objec
tive, to drive Japan out of China.”
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But was that what the United States really wanted? If Japan could not expand westward into Asia, would it turn to the Pacific, toward the Philippines, perhaps even farther east? Wilson and his advisers were torn, as indeed their successors would be in the 1920s, between the pragmatic goal of cooperation with Japan and the idealistic one of helping China. Could China be helped at all? Was it worth risking a conflict with Japan?

Just before he left for Paris Wilson summoned Wellington Koo, the Chinese ambassador in Washington, for a friendly chat. Koo, who was only thirty-two in 1919, was already a forceful and distinguished personality. Clemenceau, not usually given to praise, described him as “a young Chinese cat, Parisian of speech and dress, absorbed in the pleasure of patting and pawing the mouse, even if it was reserved for the Japanese.” Koo knew the United States well. At Columbia University in New York, where he had earned both an undergraduate and a graduate degree, he had been an outstanding student. (In Paris he spent a happy afternoon singing old university songs with a former professor who was one of the American experts.) He had also been on the university debating team, as the Japanese delegates would learn to their cost. Koo came away from his meeting with Wilson convinced that the United States was going to support China at the Peace Conference. In a friendly way Wilson had suggested that Koo travel to France on the same boat as the Americans.
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The Chinese saw this as a good sign.

Another good sign was the composition of the American delegation itself. Lansing, in his early career in Washington, had acted as counsel for the Chinese government, and one of the delegation's experts, E. T. Williams, the head of the Far Eastern affairs division in the State Department during the war, had lived in China as both missionary and diplomat. The mood of the delegation was generally anti-Japanese. Even those who were prepared to consider the Japanese case had a visceral distaste for the militaristic, nationalist side of Japan which, they felt, had dominated Japanese war aims. Despite Wilson's often expressed wish that the United States should remain neutral in Asian matters, the American delegation showed a definite bias in Paris, helping the Chinese to draw up their demands and passing them information. The Chinese responded by asking the Americans for advice, and taking it.
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Because of its own internal dissension, the Chinese government did not brief its delegation to Paris very fully, but one instruction came through clearly: China must get back the German concessions in Shantung. In December 1918, as the delegation prepared to set off, it gave a press conference (itself a sign of how times were changing in China) with a wildly optimistic shopping list for the Peace Conference. China was going to ask for a sweeping settlement of relations with the powers, including the abolition of extraterritoriality, greater control of its own tariffs and of its railways, and the return of the German area in Shantung. In return, China would allow foreign trade in Mongolia and Tibet.
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Unfortunately, the Chinese delegation mirrored all too well the country's internal divisions. Its members suspected one another of selling out to the Japanese. Even on the way to Paris there had been some curious incidents. Lu had held a two-hour meeting with the Japanese foreign minister in Tokyo. Versions of what took place at the meeting differ: the Japanese apparently believed that they got a promise that China would be cooperative at the Peace Conference; the Chinese later claimed, rather unconvincingly, that Lu merely recognized the existence of the secret agreements of 1918 between China and Japan, without accepting their validity. During the same stopover in Tokyo, a box in the Chinese luggage containing important documents, including the full text of the secret agreements between China and Japan, was stolen. In Paris, C. T. Wang, a graduate of the Yale law school who represented the south China faction, sent a cable to Shanghai newspapers with dark accusations about “certain traitors” among his colleagues. He may have meant Koo, who was rumored to be engaged to a daughter of a notorious pro-Japanese official. (In fact Koo had fallen in love with a beautiful young Indonesian heiress who was in Paris.) Lu was dogged by reports that he had taken bribes from the Japanese. He became increasingly morose and withdrawn as the months went by.
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