1.
American apologists for that part of the Peace Treaty which relates to
China have the advantage of the illusions of distance. Most of the
arguments seem strange to anyone who lives in China even for a few
months. He finds the Japanese on the spot using the old saying about
territory consecrated by treasure spent and blood shed. He reads in
Japanese papers and hears from moderately liberal Japanese that Japan
must protect China, as well as Japan, against herself, against her own
weak or corrupt government, by keeping control of Shantung to prevent
China from again alienating that territory to some other power.
The history of European aggression in China gives this argument great
force among the Japanese, who for the most part know nothing more
about what actually goes on in China than they used to know about
Korean conditions. These considerations, together with the immense
expectations raised among the Japanese during the war concerning their
coming domination of the Far East and the unswerving demand of excited
public opinion in Japan during the Versailles Conference for the
settlement that actually resulted, give an ironic turn to the
statement so often made that Japan may be trusted to carry out her
promises. Yes, one is often tempted to say, that is precisely what
China fears, that Japan will carry out her promises, for then China is
doomed. To one who knows the history of foreign aggression in China,
especially the technique of conquest by railway and finance, the irony
of promising to keep economic rights while returning sovereignty lies
so on the surface that it is hardly irony. China might as well be
offered Kant's Critique of Pure Reason on a silver platter as be
offered sovereignty under such conditions. The latter is equally
metaphysical.
A visit to Shantung and a short residence in its capital city, Tsinan,
made the conclusions, which so far as I know every foreigner in China
has arrived at, a living thing. It gave a vivid picture of the many
and intimate ways in which economic and political rights are
inextricably entangled together. It made one realize afresh that only
a President who kept himself innocent of any knowledge of secret
treaties during the war, could be naive enough to believe that the
promise to return complete sovereignty retaining _only_ economic
rights is a satisfactory solution. It threw fresh light upon the
contention that at most and at worst Japan had only taken over German
rights, and that since we had acquiesced in the latter's arrogations
we had no call to make a fuss about Japan. It revealed the hollowness
of the claim that pro-Chinese propaganda had wilfully misled Americans
into confusing the few hundred square miles around the port of
Tsing-tao with the Province of Shantung with its thirty millions of
Chinese population.
As for the comparison of Germany and Japan one might suppose that the
objects for which America nominally entered the war had made, in any
case, a difference. But aside from this consideration, the Germans
exclusively employed Chinese in the railway shops and for all the
minor positions on the railway itself. The railway guards (the
difference between police and soldiers is nominal in China) were all
Chinese, the Germans merely training them. As soon as Japan invaded
Shantung and took over the railway, Chinese workmen and Chinese
military guards were at once dismissed and Japanese imported to take
their places. Tsinan-fu, the inland terminus of the ex-German railway,
is over two hundred miles from Tsing-tao. When the Japanese took over
the German railway business office, they at once built barracks, and
today there are several hundred soldiers still there--where Germany
kept none. Since the armistice even, Japan has erected a powerful
military wireless within the grounds of the garrison, against of
course the unavailing protest of Chinese authorities. No foreigner can
be found who will state that Germany used her ownership of port and
railway to discriminate against other nations. No Chinese can be found
who will claim that this ownership was used to force the Chinese out
of business, or to extend German economic rights beyond those
definitely assigned her by treaty. Common sense should also teach even
the highest paid propagandist in America that there is, from the
standpoint of China, an immense distinction between a national menace
located half way around the globe, and one within two days' sail over
an inland sea absolutely controlled by a foreign navy, especially as
the remote nation has no other foothold and the nearby one already
dominates additional territory of enormous strategic and economic
value--namely, Manchuria.
These facts bear upon the shadowy distinction between the Tsing-tao
and the Shantung claim, as well as upon the solid distinction between
German and Japanese occupancy. If there still seemed to be a thin wall
between Japanese possession of the port of Tsing-tao and usurpation of
Shantung, it was enough to stop off the train in Tsinan-fu to see the
wall crumble. For the Japanese wireless and the barracks of the army
of occupation are the first things that greet your eyes. Within a few
hundred feet of the railway that connects Shanghai, via the important
center of Tientsin, with the capital, Peking, you see Japanese
soldiers on the nominally Chinese street, guarding their barracks.
Then you learn that if you travel upon the ex-German railway towards
Tsing-tao, you are ordered to show your passport as if you were
entering a foreign country. And as you travel along the road
(remembering that you are over two hundred miles from Tsing-tao) you
find Japanese soldiers at every station, and several garrisons and
barracks at important towns on the line. Then you realize that at the
shortest possible notice, Japan could cut all communications between
southern China (together with the rich Yangste region) and the
capital, and with the aid of the Southern Manchurian Railway at the
north of the capital, hold the entire coast and descend at its good
pleasure upon Peking.
You are then prepared to learn from eye-witnesses that when Japan made
its Twenty-one Demands upon China, machine guns were actually in
position at strategic points throughout Shantung, with trenches dug
and sandbags placed. You know that the Japanese liberal spoke the
truth, who told you, after a visit to China and his return to protest
against the action of his government, that the Japanese already had
such a military hold upon China that they could control the country
within a week, after a minimum of fighting, if war should arise. You
also realize the efficiency of official control of information and
domestic propaganda as you recall that he also told you that these
things were true at the time of his visit, under the Terauchi cabinet,
but had been completely reversed by the present Hara ministry. For I
have yet to find a single foreigner or Chinese who is conscious of any
difference of policy, save as the end of the war has forced the
necessity of caution, since other nations can now look China-wards as
they could not during the war.
An American can get an idea of the realities of the present situation
if he imagines a foreign garrison and military wireless in Wilmington,
with a railway from that point to a fortified sea-port controlled by
the foreign power, at which the foreign nation can land, without
resistance, troops as fast as they can be transported, and with bases
of supply, munitions, food, uniforms, etc., already located at
Wilmington, at the sea-port and several places along the line. Reverse
the directions from south to north, and Wilmington will stand for
Tsinan-fu, Shanghai for New York, Nanking for Philadelphia with Peking
standing for the seat of government at Washington, and Tientsin for
Baltimore. Suppose in addition that the Pennsylvania road is the sole
means of communication between Washington and the chief commercial and
industrial centers, and you have the framework of the Shantung picture
as it presents itself daily to the inhabitants of China. Upon second
thought, however, the parallel is not quite accurate. You have to add
that the same foreign nation controls also all coast communications
from, say, Raleigh southwards, with railway lines both to the nearby
coast and to New Orleans. For (still reversing directions) this
corresponds to the position of Imperial Japan in Manchuria with its
railways to Dairen and through Korea to a port twelve hours sail from
a great military center in Japan proper. These are not remote
possibilities nor vague prognostications. They are accomplished facts.
Yet the facts give _only_ the framework of the picture. What is
actually going on within Shantung? One of the demands of the
"postponed" group of the Twenty-one Demands was that Japan should
supply military and police advisers to China. They are not so much
postponed but that Japan enforced specific concessions from China
during the war by diplomatic threats to reintroduce their discussion,
or so postponed that Japanese advisers are not already installed in
the police headquarters of the city of Tsinan, the capital city of
Shantung of three hundred thousand population where the Provincial
Assembly meets and all the Provincial officials reside. Within recent
months the Japanese consul has taken a company of armed soldiers with
him when he visited the Provincial Governor to make certain demands
upon him, the visit being punctuated by an ostentatious surrounding of
the Governor's yamen by these troops. Within the past few weeks, two
hundred cavalry came to Tsinan and remained there while Japanese
officials demanded of the Governor drastic measures to suppress the
boycott, while it was threatened to send Japanese troops to police the
foreign settlement if the demand was not heeded.
A former consul was indiscreet enough to put into writing that if the
Chinese Governor did not stop the boycott and the students' movement
by force if need be, he would take matters into his own hands. The
chief tangible charge he brought against the Chinese as a basis of his
demand for "protection" was that Chinese store-keepers actually
refused to accept Japanese money in payment for goods, not ordinary
Japanese money at that, but the military notes with which, so as to
save drain upon the bullion reserves, the army of occupation is paid.
And all this, be it remembered, is more than two hundred miles from
Tsing-tao and from eight to twelve months after the armistice. Today's
paper reports a visit of Japanese to the Governor to inform him that
unless he should prevent a private theatrical performance from being
given in Tsinan by the students, they would send their own forces into
the settlement to protect themselves. And the utmost they might need
protection from, was that the students were to give some plays
designed to foster the boycott!
Japanese troops overran the Province before they made any serious
attempt to capture Tsing-tao. It is only a slight exaggeration to say
that they "took" the Chinese Tsinan before they took the German
Tsing-tao. Propaganda in America has justified this act on the ground
that a German railway to the rear of Japanese forces would have been a
menace. As there were no troops but only legal and diplomatic papers
with which to attack the Japanese, it is a fair inference that the
"menace" was located in Versailles rather than in Shantung, and
concerned the danger of Chinese control of their own territory.
Chinese have been arrested by Japanese gendarmes in Tsinan and
subjected to a torturing third degree of the kind that Korea has made
sickeningly familiar. The Japanese claim that the injuries were
received while the men were resisting arrest. Considering that there
was no more legal ground for arrest than there would be if Japanese
police arrested Americans in New York, almost anybody but the pacifist
Chinese certainly would have resisted. But official hospital reports
testify to bayonet wounds and the marks of flogging. In the interior
where the Japanese had been disconcerted by the student propaganda
they raided a High School, seized a school boy at random, and took him
to a distant point and kept him locked up several days. When the
Japanese consul at Tsinan was visited by Chinese officials in protest
against these illegal arrests, the consul disclaimed all jurisdiction.
The matter, he said, was wholly in the hands of the military
authorities in Tsing-tao. His disclaimer was emphasized by the fact
that some of the kidnapped Chinese were taken to Tsing-tao for
"trial."
The matter of economic rights in relation to political domination will
be discussed later in this article. It is no pleasure for one with
many warm friends in Japan, who has a great admiration for the
Japanese people as distinct from the ruling military and bureaucratic
class, to report such facts as have been stated. One might almost say,
one might positively say from the standpoint of Japan itself, that the
worst thing that can be charged against the policy of Japan in China
for the last six years is its immeasurable stupidity. No nation has
ever misjudged the national psychology of another people as Japan has
that of China. The alienation of China is widespread, deep, bitter.
Even the most pessimistic of the Chinese who think that China is to
undergo a complete economic and political domination by Japan do not
think it can last, even without outside intervention, more than half a
century.
Today, at the beginning of a new year, (1920) the boycott is much more
complete and efficient than in the most tense days of last summer.
Unfortunately, the Japanese policy seems to be under a truly Greek
fate which drives it on. Concessions that would have produced a
revulsion of feeling in favor of Japan a year ago will now merely
salve the surface of the wound. What would have been welcomed even
eight months ago would now be received with contempt. There is but one
way in which Japan can now restore herself. It is nothing less than
complete withdrawal from Shantung, with possibly a strictly commercial
concession at Tsing-tao and a real, not a Manchurian, Open Door.
According to the Japanese-owned newspapers published in Tsinan, the
Japanese military commander in Tsing-tao recently made a speech to
visiting journalists from Tokyo in which he said: "The suspicions of
China cannot now be allayed merely by repeating that we have no
territorial ambitions in China. We must attain complete economic
domination of the Far East. But if Chino-Japanese relations do not
improve, some third party will reap the benefit. Japanese residing in
China incur the hatred of the Chinese. For they regard themselves as
the proud citizens of a conquering country. When the Japanese go into
partnership with the Chinese they manage in the greater number of
cases to have the profits accrue to themselves. If friendship between
China and Japan is to depend wholly upon the government it will come
to nothing. Diplomatists, soldiers, merchants, journalists should
repent the past. The change must be complete." But it will not be
complete until the Japanese withdraw from Shantung leaving their
nationals there upon the footing of other foreigners in China.
2.
In discussing the return to China by Japan of a metaphysical
sovereignty while economic rights are retained, I shall not repeat the
details of German treaty rights as to the railway and the mines. The
reader is assumed to be familiar with those facts. The German seizure
was outrageous. It was a flagrant case of Might making Right. As von
Buelow cynically but frankly told the Reichstag, while Germany did not
intend to partition China, she also did not intend to be the passenger
left behind in the station when the train started. Germany had the
excuse of prior European aggressions, and in turn her usurpation was
the precedent for further foreign rape. If judgments are made on a
comparative basis, Japan is entitled to all of the white-washing that
can be derived from the provocations of European imperialistic powers,
including those countries that in domestic policy are democratic. And
every fairminded person will recognize that, leaving China out of the
reckoning, Japan's proximity to China gives her aggressions the color
of self-defence in a way that cannot be urged in behalf of any
European power.
It is possible to look at European aggressions in, say, Africa as
incidents of a colonization movement. But no foreign policy in Asia
can shelter itself behind any colonization plea. For continental Asia
is, for practical purposes, India and China, representing two of the
oldest civilizations of the globe and presenting two of its densest
populations. If there is any such thing in truth as a philosophy of
history with its own inner and inevitable logic, one may well shudder
to think of what the closing acts of the drama of the intercourse of
the West and East are to be. In any case, and with whatever comfort
may be derived from the fact that the American continents have not
taken part in the aggression and hence may act as a mediator to avert
the final tragedy, residence in China forces upon one the realization
that Asia is, after all, a large figure in the future reckoning of
history. Asia is really here after all. It is not simply a symbol in
western algebraic balances of trade. And in the future, so to speak,
it is going to be even more here, with its awakened national
consciousness of about half the population of the whole globe.
Let the agreements of France and Great Britain made with Japan during
the war stand for the measure of western consciousness of the reality
of only a small part of Asia, a consciousness generated by the
patriotism of Japan backed by its powerful army and navy. The same
agreement measures western unconsciousness of the reality of that part
of Asia which lies within the confines of China. An even better
measure of western unconsciousness may be found perhaps in such a
trifling incident as this:--An English friend long resident in
Shantung told me of writing indignantly home concerning the British
part in the Shantung settlement. The reply came, complacently stating
that Japanese ships did so much in the war that the Allies could not
properly refuse to recognize Japan's claims. The secret agreements
themselves hardly speak as eloquently for the absence of China from
the average western consciousness. In saying that China and Asia are
to be enormously significant figures in future reckonings, the spectre
of a military Yellow Peril is not meant nor even the more credible
spectre of an industrial Yellow Peril. But Asia has come to
consciousness, and her consciousness of herself will soon be such a
massive and persistent thing that it will force itself upon the
reluctant consciousness of the west, and lie heavily upon its
conscience. And for this fact, China and the western world are
indebted to Japan.
These remarks are more relevant to a consideration of the relationship
of economic and political rights in Shantung than they perhaps seem.
For a moment's reflection will call to mind that all political foreign
aggression in China has been carried out for commercial and financial
ends, and usually upon some economic pretext. As to the immediate part
played by Japan in bringing about a consciousness which will from the
present time completely change the relations of the western powers to
China, let one little story testify. Some representatives of an
English missionary board were making a tour of inspection through
China. They went into an interior town in Shantung. They were received
with extraordinary cordiality by the entire population. Some time
afterwards some of their accompanying friends returned to the village
and were received with equally surprising coldness. It came out upon
inquiry that the inhabitants had first been moved by the rumor that
these people were sent by the British government to secure the removal
of the Japanese. Later they were moved by indignation that they had
been disappointed.
It takes no forcing to see a symbol in this incident. Part of it
stands for the almost incredible ignorance which has rendered China so
impotent nationally speaking. The other part of it stands for the new
spirit which has been aroused even among the common people in remote
districts. Those who fear, or who pretend to fear, a new Boxer
movement, or a definite general anti-foreign movement, are, I think,
mistaken. The new consciousness goes much deeper. Foreign policies
that fail to take it into account and that think that relations with
China can be conducted upon the old basis will find this new
consciousness obtruding in the most unexpected and perplexing ways.
One might fairly say, still speaking comparatively, that it is part of
the bad luck of Japan that her proximity to China, and the opportunity
the war gave her to outdo the aggressions of European powers, have
made her the first victim of this disconcerting change. Whatever the
motives of the American Senators in completely disassociating the
United States from the peace settlement as regards China, their action
is a permanent asset to China, not only in respect to Japan but with
respect to all Chinese foreign relations. Just before our visit to
Tsinan, the Shantung Provincial Assembly had passed a resolution of
thanks to the American Senate. More significant is the fact that they
passed another resolution to be cabled to the English Parliament,
calling attention to the action of the American Senate and inviting
similar action. China in general and Shantung in particular feels the
reinforcement of an external approval. With this duplication, its
national consciousness has as it were solidified. Japan is simply the
first object to be affected.
The concrete working out of economic rights in Shantung will be
illustrated by a single case which will have to stand as typical.
Po-shan is an interior mining village. The mines were not part of the
German booty; they were Chinese owned. The Germans, whatever their
ulterior aims, had made no attempt at dispossessing the Chinese. The
mines, however, are at the end of a branch line of the new Japanese
owned railway--owned by the government, not by a private corporation,
and guarded by Japanese soldiers. Of the forty mines, the Japanese
have worked their way, in only four years, into all but four.
Different methods are used. The simplest is, of course, discrimination
in the use of the railway for shipping. Downright refusal to furnish
cars while competitors who accepted Japanese partners got them, is one
method. Another more elaborate method is to send but one car when a
large number is asked for, and then when it is too late to use cars,
send the whole number asked for or even more, and then charge a large
sum for demurrage in spite of the fact the mine no longer wants them
or has cancelled the order. Redress there is none.
Tsinan has no special foreign concessions. It is, however, a "treaty
port" where nationals of all friendly powers can do business. But
Po-shan is not even a treaty port. Legally speaking no foreigners can
lease land or carry on any business there. Yet the Japanese have
forced a settlement as large in area as the entire foreign settlement
in the much larger town of Tsinan. A Chinese refused to lease land
where the Japanese wished to relocate their railway station. Nothing
happened to him directly. But merchants could not get shipping space,
or receive goods by rail. Some of them were beaten up by thugs. After
a time, they used their influence with their compatriot to lease his
land. Immediately the persecutions ceased. Not all the land has been
secured by threats or coercion; some has been leased directly by
Chinese moved by high prices, in spite of the absence of any legal
sanction. In addition, the Japanese have obtained control of the
electric light works and some pottery factories, etc.
Now even admitting that this is typical of the methods by which the
Japanese plant themselves, a natural American reaction would be to say
that, after all, the country is built up industrially by these
enterprises, and that though the rights of some individuals may have
been violated, there is nothing to make a national, much less an
international fuss about. More or less unconsciously we translate
foreign incidents into terms of our own experience and environment,
and thus miss the entire point. Since America was largely developed by
foreign capital to our own economic benefit and without political
encroachments, we lazily suppose some such separation of the economic
and political to be possible in China. But it must be remembered that
China is not an open country. Foreigners can lease land, carry on
business, and manufacture only in accord with express treaty
agreements. There are no such agreements in the cases typified by the
Po-shan incident. We may profoundly disagree with the closed economic
policy of China, or we may believe that under existing circumstances
it represents the part of prudence for her. That makes no difference.
_Given the frequent occurrence of such economic invasions, with the
backing of soldiers of the Imperial Army, with the overt aid of the
Imperial Railway, and with the refusal of Imperial officials to
intervene, there is clear evidence of the attitude and intention of
the Japanese government in Shantung._
Because the population of Shantung is directly confronted with an
immense amount of just such evidence, it cannot take seriously the
professions of vague diplomatic utterances. What foreign nation is
going to intervene to enforce Chinese rights in such a case as
Po-shan? Which one is going effectively to call the attention of Japan
to such evidences of its failure to carry out its promise? Yet the
accumulation of precisely such seemingly petty incidents, and not any
single dramatic great wrong, will secure Japan's economic and
political domination of Shantung. It is for this reason that
foreigners resident in Shantung, no matter in what part, say that they
see no sign whatever that Japan is going to get out; that, on the
contrary, everything points to a determination to consolidate her
position. How long ago was the Portsmouth treaty signed, and what were
its nominal pledges about evacuation of Manchurian territory?
Not a month will pass without something happening which will give a
pretext for delay, and for making the surrender of Shantung
conditional upon this, that and the other thing. Meantime the
penetration of Shantung by means of railway discrimination, railway
military guards, continual nibblings here and there, will be going on.
It would make the chapter too long to speak of the part played by
manipulation of finance in achieving this process of attrition of
sovereignty. Two incidents must suffice. During the war, Japanese
traders with the connivance of their government gathered up immense
amounts of copper cash from Shantung and shipped it to Japan against
the protests of the Chinese government. What does sovereignty amount
to when a country cannot control even its own currency system? In
Manchuria the Japanese have forced the introduction of several hundred
million dollars of paper currency, nominally, of course, based on a
gold reserve. These notes are redeemable, however, only in Japan
proper. And there is a law in Japan forbidding the exportation of
gold. And there you are.
Japan itself has recently afforded an object lesson in the actual
connection of economic and political rights in China. It is so
beautifully complete a demonstration that it was surely unconscious.
Within the last two weeks, Mr. Obata, the Japanese minister in Peking,
has waited upon the government with a memorandum saying that the
Foochow incident was the culminating result of the boycott; that if
the boycott continues, a series of such incidents is to be
apprehended, saying that the situation has become "intolerable" for
Japan, and disavowing all responsibility for further consequences
unless the government makes a serious effort to stop the boycott.
Japan then immediately makes certain specific demands. China must stop
the circulation of handbills, the holding of meetings to urge the
boycott, the destruction of Japanese goods that have become Chinese
property--none have been destroyed that are Japanese owned. Volumes
could not say more as to the real conception of Japan of the
connection between the economic and the political relations of the two
countries. Surely the pale ghost of "Sovereignty" smiled ironically as
he read this official note. President Wilson after having made in the
case of Shantung a sharp and complete separation of economic and
political rights, also said that a nation boycotted is within sight of
surrender. Disassociation of words from acts has gone so far in his
case that he will hardly be able to see the meaning of Mr. Obata's
communication. The American sense of humor and fair-play may however
be counted upon to get its point.
January, 1920.