Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [225]
Finally, at the Washington naval disarmament conference, with the British and the Americans acting as mediators, Japan got China to agree to a settlement under which China resumed full sovereignty in Shantung on February 4, 1922. The railway from the port of Tsingtao to the interior, which had caused such trouble, was sold back to China under a complicated scheme that effectively left Japan in control for the next decade. China was probably the loser in financial terms: the railway, as the Japanese had discovered, was unprofitable.54 In Washington in 1922, Japan also signed a treaty with the other powers guaranteeing China’s sovereignty and territorial independence. That guarantee ran out in 1937, when Japan invaded the mainland of China, and Shantung, along with all the coastal provinces right down to the south, passed under Japanese control.
The individuals who had played their roles at Paris went on to very different careers. After the debacle of June 1919, Lu Zhengxiang lost interest in diplomacy. He spent a few undemanding years as Chinese minister in Switzerland; then, when his beloved wife died in 1926, he entered a Benedictine monastery in Belgium, where he eventually rose to be abbot. He died in 1949 and is buried in Bruges. Koo continued to shine, serving China several times as its foreign minister, as its premier, and as ambassador in London, Washington and Paris. He represented China at the League of Nations and he was present at the founding of the United Nations. From 1966 to 1976, he sat as a judge on the International Court of Justice at The Hague. In 1977, Columbia University had a round of celebrations for his ninetieth birthday. In her memoirs, Madame Koo, the beautiful young heiress from Indonesia who had captivated him in 1919 in Paris, wrote rather sadly: “He was dedicated to his country. That he never saw me as an individual is not surprising. He was an honourable man, the kind China needed, but not a husband for me.”55 Wellington Koo died in 1985, at the age of ninety-eight.
Several junior members of the American delegation resigned over the American position on Shantung. Lansing hung on as secretary of state in spite of his distaste. He had always felt that the United States should avoid a confrontation over China. As he had warned on an earlier occasion, “It would be quixotic in the extreme to allow the question of China’s territorial integrity to involve the United States in international difficulties.” When Wilson fought unsuccessfully to persuade the American people to support the peace settlements, one of the issues that came up repeatedly at public meetings and in the Senate was the betrayal of China over Shantung. In the opinion of David Hunter Miller, the American legal expert at the Peace Conference, “most of the tears shed for the ‘Rape of Shantung’ were wept by Republican crocodiles, who cared no more for China than for Hecuba.” In his last week in office, Wilson sent a note to buy tickets for a ball for the Chinese Famine Relief Fund. “I am very glad to be of any assistance,” he wrote, “however slight.”56
PART SEVEN
SETTING THE MIDDLE EAST ALIGHT
25
The Greatest Greek Statesman Since Pericles
IN DECEMBER 1918, when the Greek delegation to the Peace Conference left Athens, members of Parliament lined up to kiss the hand of its leader, the prime minister, Eleutherios Venizelos. A curious display for a man who was seen, in Western Europe at least, as a great democrat. The delegation stopped in Rome, where Venizelos talked with the Italian prime minister and foreign minister about the competing Italian and Greek claims for Albanian and Turkish territory. No agreement was reached. The Italian press, hostile at the start of the visit, became even more so when the train carrying the Greeks from Italy to France accidently killed two railway workers. In Paris, the delegates took possession of three floors of the Hôtel Mercedes, close to the British. Although they numbered only nineteen, they had taken rooms for eighty people.1