Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [215]
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.8 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.9
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.”10 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. 11
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