PARIS 1919 (62 page)

The Chinese were shattered. Lu sent Wilson a dignified note. China had put its faith in the Fourteen Points and on the promise of a new way of conducting international relations. “She has relied, above all, on the justice and equity of her case. The result has been, to her, a grievous disappointment.” Wilson's own advisers were almost unanimous in urging him to reject Japan's claims, whatever the consequences. Bliss considered resigning in order to avoid signing the treaty; with the support of his fellow delegates Lansing and White, he sent a stern letter to Wilson saying, “If it be right for a policeman, who recovers your purse, to keep the contents and claim that he has fulfilled his duty in returning the empty purse, then Japan's conduct may be tolerated.” And he put his finger on the moral issue. If Japan got Shantung, why shouldn't Italy get Fiume? “Peace,” he concluded, “is desirable, but there are things dearer than peace, justice and freedom.”
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Wilson did what he could to limit the damage, and the effort nearly finished him. “Last night I could not sleep,” he told his doctor, “my mind was so full of the Japanese-Chinese controversy.” Grayson reported that he had never seen him so tired. Wilson insisted on detailed descriptions of what Japan was getting in China, right down to the composition of the railway police in Shantung. (They were to be Chinese with, where necessary, Japanese instructors.) When the Shantung clauses of the treaty came up for their final consideration at the meeting of the Council of Four on April 30, he also got a verbal assurance from the Japanese delegates that Japan would eventually give back sovereignty in Shantung to China. The Japanese steadfastly refused to put this in writing on the grounds that any appearance of giving way would inflame public opinion at home.
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By this point, the news that things were going badly for China had leaked out. Paris was full of rumors, which the press picked up. On the evening of April 29, Chinese students in Paris held a very stormy meeting in a hall in the Rue Danton. Speaker after speaker denounced the West. Wang Chingwei, who later won fame as the head of a Japanese puppet government in China, warned in fluent English of the reaction among the Chinese. A young woman art student called for an end to talk of peace: “We must go in for force.” Eugene Chen, a journalist who was later to be China's foreign minister, introduced a resolution condemning the Big Four and singling out Wilson for particular mention. It was passed unanimously. That night Wilson's security was stepped up.
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The Chinese delegation got the full details of the settlement on April 30. One member threw himself to the floor in despair. When Baker arrived at the Hôtel Lutétia late that evening to convey Wilson's excuses and his sympathy, he found a very depressed group who blamed the president for letting them down. Some of them wanted to leave Paris at once rather than sign the treaty. (Koo later told Bonsal that he would sign only if his government gave him a direct order: “I hope they will not make me sign. It would be my death sentence.”)
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The negotiations in Paris had been followed with intense interest on the other side of the world. The Chinese delegation had been bombarded with telegrams, from Chinese student organizations, chambers of commerce, even unions, all expressing their faith in Wilson's Fourteen Points and their confidence that the Peace Conference would respect China's claims.
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By the first weekend in May, newspapers in China's major cities were reporting that the Shantung rights were going to be handed over to Japan. Chinese nationalists were bitterly critical of their own government but they were even angrier, if possible, with the Western powers.

On the night of May 3, a Saturday, students at Peking University, always a center of nationalist agitation, called together representatives from all the city's universities and colleges to plan a demonstration for the following morning in the great square of Tienanmen. The meeting was packed and highly emotional. The students agreed to send telegrams to the Chinese delegation in Paris asking them not to sign the treaty. One young man cut his finger and wrote on the wall in blood demanding the return of Tsingtao.
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The fury of the Chinese nationalists, significantly, went beyond merely condemning the Shantung decision. As one student recalled:

When the news of the Paris Peace Conference finally reached us we were greatly shocked. We at once awoke to the fact that foreign nations were still selfish and militaristic and that they were all great liars. I remember the night of May 2nd and very few of us slept. A group of my friends and I talked almost the whole night. We came to the conclusion that a greater world war would be coming sooner or later, and that this great war would be fought in the East. We had nothing to do with our Government, that we knew very well, and at the same time we could no longer depend upon the principles of any so-called great leader like Woodrow Wilson, for example. Looking at our people and at the pitiful ignorant masses, we couldn't help but feel that we must struggle.
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The morning of May 4 was cool and windy. By lunchtime more than 3,000 demonstrators had converged on Tienanmen Square. Most wore the traditional silk gowns of scholars, but in a gesture to the Western world some also had bowler hats. Marchers carried placards saying “Give Us Back Tsingtao” or “Oppose Power Politics” or “China Belongs to the Chinese.” The leaders carried a manifesto which said dramatically, “This is the last chance for China in her life and death struggle.” By two P.M. the crowd was growing bigger and was moving toward the foreign legation quarter. When it reached the house of a minister widely suspected to be a stooge of the Japanese, the mood turned nasty. Demonstrators rushed into the house, smashed furniture and, when they could not find the minister himself, beat up the Chinese ambassador to Japan, whom they found hiding. The government tried to suppress the agitation by arresting the more prominent student leaders, which only inflamed opinion further. The dean of humanities from Peking University was seen handing out leaflets on a street corner. Demonstrations spread to other big cities in China, and nonstudents, from dockworkers to businessmen, began to join in. The government was obliged to back down; in a humiliating reverse, it released the students with apologies.
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The disturbances finished off that other peace conference—the one in Shanghai that was trying to reconcile north and south China. The southern faction tried to ride the wave of popular sentiment by demanding that the Peking government reject all the wartime agreements with Japan and refuse to accept the decision on Shantung. This was unacceptable to the northern faction, who were by now dominated by pro-Japanese military, and the Shanghai conference was suspended indefinitely.
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With the collapse of even that faint hope, China was condemned to another nine years of disunity and civil war.

The fourth of May was a landmark in the development of Chinese nationalism. It came to stand for the whole period of intellectual ferment; but what was more important, it marked the rejection by many Chinese intellectuals of the West. They had turned to Western democracy and liberalism before 1919, often because they could find no other model. Some had always felt uneasy with the Western stress on individualism and competition. The failure of the Chinese Republic and the spectacle of European nations tearing themselves apart in the war had deepened the unease. One distinguished scholar who was in Paris as an observer during the Peace Conference wrote home that Europeans “are like travelers in the desert and have lost their direction. . . . They are in utter despair. . . . They once had a great dream about the omnipotence of science. Now their talk is filled with its bankruptcy.”
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Coincidence counts for more in history than some may care to think, and in 1919 an alternative presented itself to the Chinese. Not the alternative of returning to China's traditional ways, but the new order in Russia. The Russian Revolution offered an example of a traditional society, not unlike China's, which had apparently skipped ahead to the future in one bold and glorious move. The disillusionment with the West, their own dismal experience with Western-style democracy after 1911, and the clear alternative presented by Russia all came together to make communism seem the solution to China's problems. If further confirmation was needed, it came with an unprecedented gesture made by the new Bolshevik commissar for foreign affairs, who offered in the summer of 1919 to give up all the conquests and concessions squeezed out of China in the days of the tsars. (The Bolshevik government never actually delivered on the promise, but the Chinese at the time were deeply impressed by a generosity that no other power was showing.)

A year after the Paris Peace Conference, a group of Chinese radicals met to form the Chinese Communist Party. Many of the leading demonstrators from May 1919 were to become members. The dean of humanities who had handed out leaflets was the party's first chairman. Under the leadership of Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai, who had also been active in the May 4 agitation, the party went on to win power in China in 1949.
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In Paris, Koo made a valiant but doomed effort to modify the agreement in China's favor. At least he did not have to risk his life, for China did not sign the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919. The government in Peking could not make up its mind and so sent no orders. In any case, Chinese students in Paris surrounded the Hôtel Lutétia to prevent any of the delegates from leaving.
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China eventually made its peace with Germany in September 1919.

Japan got Shantung through a determined use of pressure. Was it bluffing, or would it have refused to sign the treaty, as the other powers believed? The evidence is mixed. At the height of the negotiations over Shantung in April 1919, the government in Tokyo ordered its delegation not to agree to the League covenant if Japan's claims were denied. Whether the government realized that the covenant was part of the treaty with Germany is not clear. During the same period, however, internal government documents show that Japan was afraid of becoming isolated. It might have backed down in the face of a determined refusal to give it the Shantung rights. Before the Shantung clauses were finally agreed on by the Council of Four on April 30, the Japanese prime minister, Kei Hara, told his delegates in Paris to wait for further instructions in case of such a refusal.
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The Japanese greeted their victory in Paris with mixed feelings. When the delegation returned home, its members were greeted by a crowd protesting their failure to get the racial equality clause. Saionji apologized in his formal report to the emperor: “I am sad that we could not accomplish our wishes in total.” He pointed out, however, that Japan's standing in the world was higher than it had been in 1914.
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On the other hand, the delegates came away from Paris convinced that the United States was out to stop them in China. Perhaps they were right. In 1921 the election of Warren Harding as president brought a more anti-Japanese American administration. The already difficult relationship with the United States continued to be troubled in the 1920s by disagreements in China—over the loan consortium, for example, of which they were both members— and by continued discrimination against Japanese nationals in the United States.

The victory over Shantung proved costly in other ways. In China, nationalist agitation, far from dying down, grew in ferocity, proving a serious handicap to Japanese business. Moreover, Japan's relations with other powers were damaged. The British began to think seriously about the future of the Anglo-Japanese naval alliance. The notion that Japan was a “Yellow Prussia” took firm root in the West. In the summer of 1919, Curzon lectured Chinda, now the Japanese ambassador in London, about Japan's behavior in China. Japan had been unwise to insist on its rights in China; it had created hostility in China and apprehension in Britain. Curzon urged the Japanese ambassador to think of the future of the alliance between Britain and Japan, and of the more general question of security in the Far East.
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The Japanese government, which had not counted on the depth of opposition, began to think that it should keep the promise it had made in Paris to hand back its concessions in Shantung. At the beginning of 1920, it tried to open negotiations with the Chinese government to withdraw Japanese troops from the province. The Chinese declined to discuss the matter. In the autumn of 1921, Japan made a renewed effort; it suggested conditions under which it could give up its rights in Shantung. The Chinese government refused to give a clear answer.

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.
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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.”
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Wellington Koo died in 1985, at the age of ninety-eight.