Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [218]
Shantung did not come up in Paris until the end of January. Wilson had still not decided what he should do. He explored possible alternatives. Perhaps, as he suggested to Koo, Britain might be persuaded to help China, in spite of the Anglo-Japanese alliance. Perhaps the Japanese would voluntarily give up their claims to Shantung. After all, various officials had suggested that Japan was willing to give the German concessions back to China. Perhaps Japan could save face by taking possession formally and then handing over sovereignty to China.21
The Japanese showed little disposition to compromise. On the morning of January 27, when the Supreme Council turned its attention to the fate of Germany’s colonies in the Pacific, Makino tried to lump the Shantung concessions in with the various islands that had been seized from Germany. He argued that Shantung was merely a matter involving Japan and Germany and that there was no need for China to be there when it came up. He was clearly hoping that Shantung would be disposed of briskly, along with the Pacific islands, as part of the spoils of war. The other powers decided that Shantung should be discussed separately and that China should be invited to the discussion later that afternoon.22
In the break between the morning and afternoon sessions the Chinese did what they could to pressure their friends. Lu, their nominal leader, was nowhere to be seen; it was the young Koo who called on Lansing to ask whether China could expect support from the United States. Lansing was reassuring but added that he was worried about the European powers.23
That afternoon the Chinese perched on uncomfortable gilt chairs at the Quai d’Orsay to listen to Makino give a halting and unimpressive summary of Japan’s case. (Koo claimed that Wilson told him afterward how disturbed he had been by the speech.) Koo replied for China the following morning. Although his voice shook at first, he tore into the Japanese in a dazzling speech replete with learned references to international law and Latin tags. It was true, he admitted, that China had signed agreements with Japan in 1915 and 1918 which seemed to promise that Japan would get the German rights in Shantung, but China had signed under duress and could not be held to the agreements. In any case, all questions dealing with German possessions had to be dealt with by the Peace Conference.24
China, Koo went on, was grateful to Japan for liberating Shantung from the Germans. “But grateful as they were, the Chinese delegation felt that they would be false to their duty to China and to the world if they did not object to paying their debts of gratitude by selling the birthright of their countrymen and thereby sowing the seeds of discord for the future.” National self-determination and territorial integrity, those Wilsonian principles, obliged the powers to give Shantung back to China. 25
Shantung was, said Koo, “the cradle of Chinese civilization, the birthplace of Confucius and Mencius, and a Holy Land for the Chinese.” Moreover, to allow Shantung to fall under foreign control would be to leave a “dagger pointed at the heart of China.” Ironically, that was very much how the Japanese military saw it: the war minister in Tokyo told his government that the railway running inland from the coast in Shantung was the “artery” pumping Japanese power into the Asian mainland. Borden called the Chinese presentation “very able,” and Lansing thought that Koo had simply overwhelmed the Japanese. Clemenceau’s warm congratulations,