Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [217]
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.17 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. 18
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.19
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