The Truth about China and Japan/Chapter 5

by B. L. Putnam Weale

V

IF JAPAN REFUSES?

We have reached the last phase—the question of Japan.

Until Japan defeated China in 1894, the condition of her armaments, her finance, and her industry was of a modest and even primitive nature. She had an army of a hundred thousand soldiers; a navy comprising a few protected cruisers; a silver currency mixed with the remains of an abortive National Bank system copied (on the late Prince Ito's recommendation) from America; and a foreign trade of a hundred million dollars a year. By her Treaty of Peace, however, she received forty million pounds in sterling; established a gold exchange standard, which was maintained by keeping in London her main stock of the yellow metal (a practice continued even to-day, which has a profound and little-understood effect on Far Eastern politics); and almost immediately recovered from Western nations her passionately contested tariff and the judicial autonomy (the new treaties becoming operative in 1899).

It is from this date, then, that Japan definitely enters international politics; the rock on which she built was defeated China. Prior to that she had barely been more than a third-class Power, with little vision of greater days. Troubled by many internal problems, her efforts to cope with the reorganization of her finances had signally failed. It is true that the matter of her inconvertible paper money had been solved, and a Central Bank of Issue, modelled on the Belgian National Bank, established before Chinese wealth had been tapped. But without the stock of gold won by the Korean war it is difficult to believe that her exchange standard, which is the head and front of her banking and industrial system, could have been created. In this, as in other matters, Japan's prototype—absolutely and entirely—was Germany of the post 1870-71 period. Germany was her light and her guide—and almost every step that Prussia took after her defeat of France was sedulously copied.

Although she emerged from her Chinese war financially satisfied, Japan was in many ways greatly embittered. Her original Treaty of Peace, which had included the cession of the Liaotung peninsula, had been torn up by the action of Russia, Germany, and France, who had interposed a blunt fiat backed by battleships; and she had been forced to return to China what she had already annexed. She was bitterly hurt by this—both on account of the international humiliation, and because her real motives had been misunderstood. She had believed that the only method of terminating Manchu intrigue in the Korean peninsula was completely to cut off all land-contact between the Courts of Peking and Seoul; the Liaotung was therefore desired not so much as a Japanese colony as a buffer-territory between two capitals united by historic ties, and by a thousand-mile Imperial highway along which Korea's tribute missions had journeyed for so many centuries. Obsessed with this point of view, which was totally unrelated to world-politics, the shock to her pride was very great when she was peremptorily shown that the Yellow Sea was not a lake, but part of a general scheme of things which she must envisage as a whole with her eyes specially fixed on the heavy guns of the ships from the West.

The action of England had been different from the action of the three Continental Powers. England had declined to be associated with the intervention, although during the period of the war she had frankly warned Japan off all China treaty ports, declaring that she would not tolerate interference with her trade. Nevertheless England was so friendly that it was largely due to her initiative that tariff and judicial subjection were so rapidly abolished, even America not caring to deal with the matter until Britain had spoken.

By 1895, therefore, Japan had certain very clear-cut ideas on international politics. She had been given practical proofs of hostility and of qualified friendship; and American silence during this critical period had told her that the United States as a world-Power was still more of a theory than a fact. Japan was still so weak that she did not dare to challenge what almost immediately took place in Korea because the buffer-territory idea had been destroyed; and the fearful assassination of the old Korean queen by Soshi and secret agents of the Japanese Legation showed how desperate the collapse of her plans had made her. Russian influence now not only took the place of Chinese influence in Korea, but by the railway plans the great Northern Power showed that her goal was the ice-free waters of the Yellow Sea, which she desired to dominate. The curious and perverse after-war diplomacy of Li Hung Chang, which began with secret conversations at the Tsar's coronation in Moscow in 1896 and finally culminated in acquiescence in the cool Slav seizure of Port Arthur, were daggers in the heart of Japan—which she was unable to ward off. But in 1900, on the occasion of the Boxer explosion, by winning the esteem of the world by the excellence of her expeditionary force, she prepared the ground for what subsequently happened. The Colossus of the North, after playing for more than half a century like a cat with a mouse with Chinese sovereignty, had become too bold. Casting off the fiction of friendly co-operation, which had been her insistent cry ever since Muravieff had first sailed down the Amur in the middle of the nineteenth century, Russia had invaded all Manchuria and established garrisons even to the mouth of the Yalu, her intrigues in Seoul to obtain the lease of a harbour at the toe of the Korean boot—Masampo for choice—being so insistent as to make the Mikado's country seethe with rage.

In 1904 Japan hazarded the impossible. The splendid gesture which involved her in war with Russia was forced on her; it was in every sense a war which had to be fought if Japan were to retain her real independence. There is no question but that Russia directly and categorically refused all real accommodation; she bluffed and hoped against hope to the very end. Japan fought desperately and won a qualified victory which would have been much more justly settled had it not been for the impetuosity of the late President Roosevelt. The Treaty of Peace, which would have been signed in Peking and not at Portsmouth, had all the surrounding circumstances been properly understood, was an unfortunate instrument; like the Lansing-Ishii Notes, it was a monument of haste rather than of prescience. A wiser policy would have regarded the Scriptural invocation regarding peace-makers as politically unsuitable to the circumstances and left the protagonists strictly alone. Had that been done both would have come to their senses and all history might have been different in the West as in the East; for both were not more than four or five months off complete exhaustion. Empty ammunition-wagons, depleted battalions, and ominous murmurs from the civil population—these are the only things that bureaucratic governments really appreciate. Neither Russia nor Japan could have faced in 1905 another winter campaign.

II

We have said the Treaty of Peace should have been signed in Peking: had that been done it would not have been necessary to have had a double arrangement—one between Japan and Russia, followed by a separate ratification between China and Japan. Too little attention has been directed to the action Japan took in December, 1905, in the Chinese capital: all the essential business—the business really worth recording as a result of the territorial struggle, since it involved the lord of the soil—took place here. Briefly, it was in this month of December, 1905—fourteen years ago—that Japan first clearly showed open political immorality. From the practical point of view all that the Portsmouth Treaty had done, with the exception of recognizing the old Japanese claim to half of Saghalien—was to record an accomplished fact—namely, Russia's international humiliation because of the crass failure of her army and navy. The curious connection of China with the imbroglio, arising from the circumstance that the entire war had been waged on her soil, and was directly concerned with certain grants she had been induced to make in the matter of a harbour, two railways, and the Yalu forestconcession—this curious connection was never rightfully considered, and China was treated as negligible. Manchuria being as Chinese as the metropolitan province of Chihli, a proper and decent neighbourly spirit, not to speak of expediency and foresight, should have prompted Japan to insist on the war settlement being a tripartite agreement to which three contracting parties—Russia, China, and Japan—put their signatures, thus doing away entirely with the past causes of friction. But this would have meant the banishment of obscurantism; and Japan abroad thrives on organized opposition to inquiry and reform as on nothing else. To put it squarely, Japan in 1905, had she been honest, should have demanded that the whole Manchurian railway enterprise be retroceded to China—the trans-Manchurian lines as well as the South Manchurian—and then converted into a standard-gauge railway, after a lapse of time just sufficient to allow Russia to build the Amur railway and link up her Far Eastern possessions on her own territory. Had Japan taken this one step she would have made China her ally for all time; trebled her influence in every part of her neighbour's vast territories; and so handicapped Westernism that it is extremely doubtful whether any further development of European or American influence or industrial enterprise would have been possible. There is also little doubt that in such circumstances the Manchu dynasty would never have fallen as it did in 1912, but would have been converted very peacefully into a constitutional monarchy. Humiliation in foreign affairs was the last straw to break the camel's back; and in this humiliation Japan played the largest part. The short-sightedness of Japanese policy, therefore, has been the ally of republicanism in the Far East; the sponsor of Western influence; and the enemy of the peace and dignity of the Japanese Imperial House, which is to-day swaying ominously under the high winds of democratic revolt, and may yet encounter a terrible end.

III

The treaty which Japan signed with China December, 1905, actually consisted of the two following clauses only; that it should have been so brief shows the spirit in which Japan negotiated. The clauses read:—

Article I

The Imperial Chinese Government consent to all the transfers and assignments made by Russia to Japan by Articles V and VI of the Treaty of Peace above mentioned.

Article II

The Imperial Japanese Government engage that in regard to the leased territory, as well as in matters of railway construction and exploitation, they will as far as circumstances permit conform to the original agreements concluded between China and Russia. In case any question arises in the future on these subjects the Japanese Government will decide it in consultation with the Chinese Government.

Why this brevity? For very peculiar and indeed Machiavellian reasons.

No matter what the spirit of Tsarist Russia may have been in the long struggle to reach 'warm water', it is fact that every instrument the Northern Power wrote with the Peking Government from 1896 to her disastrous war with Japan at least carefully preserved the fiction that enterprises on Chinese soil were held in usufruct: Russia had the use and profit but not the property. This is of the highest importance. It was specifically provided, for instance, in the Port Arthur lease (Article VI), that "Port Arthur shall be a naval port for the sole use of Russian and Chinese men-of-war", i.e. it was an anchorage to which China had as much right as Russia. When in 1905 this matter was brought up in the Sino-Japanese negotiations, the Japanese plenipotentiaries immediately took exception to the contention, and declared that it was on record that on the only occasion during the period of the Russian lease that two Chinese cruisers had attempted to dock, the Russians had denied the right and therefore the right had lapsed. China was in a position to prove from the logbooks of the two cruisers in question that the Russian harbour authorities had signalled on the occasion in question "docks occupied: no accommodation", and the Japanese negotiators, finally convinced that the point was against them, acted in a manner which sheds an interesting light on their constant professions of friendship for "a kindred Asiatic race". The naval authorities were at once given orders to strip the Port Arthur docks completely and entirely so that there should be no dockyard facilities left; and Port Arthur, which had sheltered a Russian fleet more formidable than the entire Japanese navy in 1904, was made a derelict and rated as a second-class naval station to keep the Chinese out and allow Japan gradually to assume the right of eminent domain. These are the things as they really occur in the Far East,—these are the foreign policies of Japan unmasked.

In addition to the treaty we have quoted, Japan wrote with China in 1905 a long supplementary agreement—using this method because she instinctively follows tortuous ways, believing that this gives her an opportunity to defend herself against accusations of expropriation,—and against actions which would be beneath the dignity of the Imperial House, but which her commercial appetite forces her to take.

In the supplementary treaty, Japan solemnly declared (Article II) that "in view of the earnest desire expressed by the Imperial Chinese Government to have the Japanese and Russian troops and railway guards in Manchuria withdrawn as soon as possible, and in order to meet this desire, the Imperial Japanese Government, in the event of Russia agreeing to the withdrawal of her railway guards, or in case other proper measures are agreed to between China and Russia, consent to take similar steps accordingly". What has been the result of this undertaking? Japan has made secret agreement after secret agreement with Tsarist Russia—the last one in 1916 a few months before the Russian Revolution—to secure at all costs that Russia should take no such action, her recent intrigues with General Horvath, the Tsarist agent who is still in control of the Chinese Eastern railway, being dictated with the same aim and object, namely, to prevent at all costs her "sister-nation", China, being repossessed of her sovereign rights. In the remaining articles of the supplementary treaty Japan annexes everything of value she can think of in Southern Manchuria, her policy being ruthless commercial and industrial exploitation where Russia was content merely to dominate. Friction between China and Japan has been ceaseless in Manchuria ever since, the smaller country never hesitating to use threats and pressure on the slightest provocation.

It was probably because of this trouble, and of the difficulty which she experienced in annexing Korea, that Japan determined in 1915 to settle the results of her present belligerency with Germany in a new way. In the matter of Korea, in spite of her successful war against Russia, she had been forced to enter into four successive conventions with the Seoul Government before the deed was completed; and during all this time the press and peoples of the Far East were in a state of uproar. There was first an agreement on 17th November, 1905, which placed the control and direction of the foreign relations in her hands; another on 31st July, 1907, by which all administrative measures and all high official appointments were made subject to the approval of a Japanese Resident-General; still another on 12th July, 1909, whereby the administration of justice and prisons—the essential police-power—was given her; and a final one on 23d August, 1910, when Korea was publicly annexed to the Japanese Empire and the Emperor of Korea deprived of his rightful title. Consequently, by filing the Twenty-one Demands almost immediately after Tsingtao had been captured, when every indication from the European war-theatre pointed to a drawn war, and forcing through, by means of an ultimatum, all those clauses which did not directly conflict with the treaty rights of other Powers, Japan imagined she was safe, and would be able to do from her Shantung base—Kiaochow—all she had done in Manchuria acting from the Port Arthur territory.

The nature of the things Japan thinks she has won by means of this manœuvre can easily be described; and it should be carefully noted that in these matters, as in all other essential political business, the German standard has been the one scrupulously followed. Japan has placed the Manchurian railways and the Port Arthur lease on ninety-nine-year Kiaochow terms—an action which is absolutely ultra vires; and moreover, she has not only taken over all the German enterprises in Shantung by force, but she has pushed through, by means of loans to the Peking military party, a railway extension scheme on a German-made plan, secretly prepared by Germany before the European war, aiming at making Tsingtao the sea-terminus for a railway system which at some distant date is to stretch through Central Asia and link-up with the Middle East.

The problem growing out of Manchuria and Shantung has therefore a new character. It is no longer a local Far Eastern problem: it is a world-problem which has to be faced and solved or else there will be fresh world-disaster.

IV

One final aspect has to be made clear.

Until the death of Yuan Shih-kai, Japan treated China as a country with a united government which could be held responsible and which must be treated with; after his death she deliberately abandoned this policy and dealt with specified persons as fully-authorized agents whom she seduced to her point of view, and used as her instruments. No longer using the Chinese Foreign Office as her channel of communication, she boldly commenced making secret agreements with the Northern military party, and by means of her agents in the Ministries of Communications and Finance has been able under cover of the World War to do untold harm.^[1] Adopting the simple principle that the 'postponed' Group V of the Twenty-one Demands was her principal business wito the Republic, she has for three years sought to do piecemeal and secretly what she failed to do openly, i.e. to get into her hands, or into the hands of her agents, control of Chinese arms and munitions, control of strategic areas, control of important railways and control of industrial monopolies. How many secret agreements in all she has made no one accurately knows; but the Arms Agreements made during the past three years and the Sino-Japanese Military Agreement of 1918—nominally to deal with the Bolshevist threat on China's Manchurian frontiers but really to bind Peking to her chariot-wheel—are notorious instruments, whilst the network of financial undertakings, made mainly with agents of the Ministry of Communications, is so far-reaching that it is not yet properly mapped. In defiance of the precise terms of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance Treaty, which calls upon her to communicate fully and frankly with her ally, Japan's watchword in Peking has been obscurantism and nothing but obscurantism, with disastrous results for the future well-being of the Chinese people.

And here it is necessary specially to note that until Viscount Ishii made his historic pilgrimage to Washington in 1917, and induced the United States to write the indiscreet Lansing-Ishii Notes, she was forced to hold her horses; no sooner were the Notes in her archives than she began to act in an imperious way.^[2] China had created a so-called War Participation Bureau, i.e. a Special Military Office, with a number of well-equipped divisions depending upon it, nominally for dealing with the question of organizing an expeditionary force to proceed to France, but in reality (since it was under the control of the Northern military party) to continue the fight with the South and to crush Canton. For a number of months this amiable object was assiduously pursued, fed by funds from Japan acquired by secret agreements, and with not the slightest regard for China's international pledges. Although France went so far as to offer to finance a Chinese expeditionary force, division by division as they were shipped, and drew up many memoranda to that end, Japan saw to it that the plan was killed. When intervention in Siberia seemed inevitable in May, 1918, Japan signed with the War Participation Bureau the secret Sino-Japanese military agreement in a last effort to defeat America's plan of helping Russia.^[3] By creating a new international imbroglio in which railways, Bolsheviks, and Tsarists of the stamp of General Horvath would be so mixed as to defy a solution, she added to the chaos beyond Lake Baikal; and since the triumph of the Allies and the armistice of the 11th November, by forcing the Peking Government to rename this office the National Defence Bureau, she has managed to retain it as the headquarters for Japanese intrigues. Among recent secret agreements signed by the corrupt generals attached to it is said to be one relating to Fuhkien province, which is reported to place that strategically important zone, which dominates the island of Formosa, on a quasi-Manchurian footing.

This challenge to the world's decency and honour can no longer be disregarded; it must be taken up, since imperialist Germany cannot be considered properly crushed until her copied methods have been eradicated from the Far East.

The root of the evil lies in the present nature of the Japanese Government; in the fact that under the present Constitution it is perfectly legitimate for the Japanese Ministry of War to direct the Empire's policy in China and to be above the control of the Diet.^[4] A Japanese Cabinet, directly responsible to the Diet under the Constitution, is absolutely essential to the peace and happiness of the Far East; unless that, as well as a proper extension of the franchise, can be acquired by constitutional means, it is essential to oppose Japanese intimidation of China by methods other than these adopted during the war.

For it is force that is behind the Japanese programme—not equity or justice, but force, mixed with corruption. This force is to-day semi-antiquated; for Japanese armaments are still much where they were after the Russo-Japanese War, and are totally unequal to the challenge offered to first-class maritime Powers with great interests to protect in the Far East. Indeed, it is obvious to observers on the spot that the asset of geographical isolation has been exhausted and if the League of Nations is to have meaning and reality in the East as in the West there is a method available which would instantly change the situation.

Grey battleships on the horizon-line would bring home to Japanese leaders what all the butchery of the war has failed to teach: too long have the waters of the Yellow Sea been without adequate protection.

Japan indeed stands at the cross-roads. It is for her to elect what her future is to be; whether the bacillus of imperialism is to be blown out by explosion, or dissipated by reform. Korea cried aloud for decent treatment—Korea can to-day rightfully demand either Home-rule or proper representation of her people in Japan's Diet. Here, if there ever was a case, is a country which should be administered only under a mandatory derived from a League of Nations; for what has Korea done that she should be treated as a conquered province? and why should Manchuria and the province containing the birthplace of Confucius—Shantung—be menaced by the same fate? It is not true that these regions are necessary for the overspill of the Japanese population; for they are densely populated and are not attracting Japanese immigrants. Korea, which has been under the Japanese heel for fifteen years, has to-day less than 400,000 Japanese immigrants, or a net increase of 300,000 persons since the Russo-Japanese War. During this period the Korean population has increased by over 3,000,000, and in less than two decades the land will be far more crowded than Japan. In the case of Manchuria, experience has not only conclusively proved that the Japanese cannot compete as farmers with the Chinese—that is, they cannot go on the land—but in petty trade the Chinese are ousting them, the Japanese being able to retain their hold only by a system of preferential treatment and anti-Chinese regulation which they assiduously enact in the Port Arthur leased territory and along the zone of the South Manchuria railway in a last effort to justify their claims. As for Shantung, that has long been so densely populated by the native race that vast numbers of men must go annually to other provinces—particularly to Manchuria—to find food, the villages in Shantung being so thick on the ground as to form continuous chains. It is not sufficiently known that since 1900 the population of China has increased by 68 millions—that is, by considerably more than either the present population of Germany or Japan; and that by the middle of the present century the Chinese cannot number less than 600 millions. Although Japan's northernmost island of Hokkaido is practically uninhabited and could carry 12 million people at the lowest competition, she vainly tries to push her people on to the Asiatic mainland so as to justify her so-called Asiatic Monroe Doctrine, which means for her not the protection but the subjection of the East. Hating to go abroad save to the white man's lands, where they earn great profits rapidly and easily, the Japanese care so little for their annexed territories that the Japanese population of Formosa has long been stationary if it has not actually receded. Town-dwellers by instinct; leaving much of their agriculture to women, who labour early and late in the fields, for them foreign parts have no attractions. Colonization is indeed alien to their natures; it is their military leaders who are trying almost by force to make them build a fabric of empire in the extraordinary manner we have indicated.

There is no more to be said—not a word. We have placed the problem under the searchlight; we have indicated the solution. If there is justice enough left over after Europe has settled her own troubles, Eastern Asia is surely the first claimant. For unless that precious quality is used in abundance, the day is not far distant when the crash will come and men must fight again.

1. The reader is referred to the remarkable list of loans and mortgages in the Appendix, Document C.
2. See the Appendix, Document A, for the full text. To realize the precise value of the step Mr. Secretary Lansing was induced to take in writing his Note to Viscount Ishii it is necessary to point out that from the Far Eastern point of view everything depends on the Chinese translation. In the case of the American official translation, communicated to the Chinese Foreign Office, "special interests in China" was translated as meaning: to have a share in—to be concerned with. In the Japanese official translation, communicated to the Chinese Foreign Office in advance of the American communication, "special interests" is translated as—specially acquired advantages, i.e. predominance.

   In other words, by a trick, Viscount Ishii and his friends created the impression in the mind of the Chinese Government that America, faced by armed Japan, had acquiesced in Japanese hegemony in Eastern Asia and that everything was over.

3. For the full text of the Sino-Japanese Secret Military and Naval Conventions, and the secret Arms Contracts, see Documents B and D in the Appendix, with explanatory notes attached. No impartial critic can deny, after studying these dark doings, that the whole structure of Japanese foreign policy must be changed if she is to be treated on equal terms by the rest of the world.
4. Vide the extracts from the Japanese Constitution in Document H, Appendix.