by Adam Tooze
II
For liberal China Hands such as Ambassador Reinsch or Millard, a confrontation with Japan was not unwelcome. But as we have seen, Wilson harboured deep fears about the global racial balance. In his vain struggle to preserve American neutrality, he felt himself to be the guardian of ‘white civilization’. With Europe divided this was not the moment for confrontation in the East. Racial fantasies aside, Japan was certainly a force to be reckoned with. Since the Meiji Restoration it had racked up a formidable track record of aggression.18 In 1895 Japan had humiliated China, extracted formidable reparations, and prised Korea away. In 1905, now as an ally of Britain, it had inflicted a humiliating defeat on Russia. In August 1914 a request from British Foreign Secretary Grey orchestrated by Japan’s Foreign Minister Kato had licensed Tokyo’s hasty declaration of war on Germany and its incursion into Shandong. On the lower reaches of the Yellow River within striking distance of Beijing, it was revered as a holy site of all three of China’s major religious traditions – Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism: its occupation was a new and devastating blow to Chinese prestige.
Worse was to follow. To gain the protection of the other members of the Entente, Yuan Shi-kai asked to be invited to declare war on Germany too. But Japan vetoed any show of Chinese independence. Instead, in January 1915, Tokyo handed Beijing a list of 21 demands that were soon to acquire global notoriety as one of the most flagrant expressions of imperialism produced by the war. The first four sections of the 21 Points were familiar expressions of sphere-of-influence diplomacy – a forceful restatement of familiar Japanese objectives in securing their interests in Northern China and Manchuria, contiguous with their colony of Korea. The notorious Section V demands, by contrast, were a claim to hegemony over the central administration in Beijing, its army and financial administration, that would have given Japan rights superior to all other powers throughout China.19 Because they challenged all the interested powers, the Section V demands were bound to be controversial in the West. But what no one in Japan, nor even amongst President Yuan’s inner circle in Beijing, had reckoned with was the patriotic indignation of the Chinese public.20 As news of the Japanese claims leaked out, 40,000 demonstrators marched in protest in Beijing. The nation was swept by a boycott campaign against Japanese goods. Fashionable Chinese women dropped the Tokyo hairstyles that had come into vogue after Japan’s triumph over Russia. Beijing University students resolved to recite the 21 Points every day to remind themselves of the stain on their national honour. At a stroke, what the Japanese had intended as a regional coup de main had turned into an international scandal. Whilst British diplomats struggled to prevent China and Japan coming to blows, the Washington Post broadcast the full details of the 21 Points to its indignant readership. There were speeches of protest in Congress denouncing Japan as the ‘Prussia of the East’.
There certainly were political forces in Japan willing to live up to this billing. The circle around genro Yamagata, the most influential survivor of the founding Meji generation, speculated more or less openly about the mistake that Japan had made in joining the side of the Entente. Convinced that Japan would in the long run face a confrontation with the United States, they favoured a conservative alliance with autocratic Tsarist Russia, a relationship that was consolidated by a secret treaty over the summer of 1916. But though scepticism about Japanese intentions toward China was certainly warranted, anti-Japanese outrage easily blinded Western observers to the ambiguity of imperialist politics in Japan. Facing a collapsing regime in China and competing with an aggressively expansionist autocracy in Russia, imperialism often went hand in hand in Japan with reform-minded liberalism. This was all the more the case once Japanese expansion was underwritten by the Anglo-Japanese alliance. Up until 1914, Japan’s economic development and public finances depended to an extraordinary extent on the City of London. Nor was Japan in its domestic politics the authoritarian powerhouse of liberal, anti-imperialist cliché. Following the death of the last Meiji Emperor in July 1912, four cabinets succeeded each other in short succession, buffeted by elite infighting and popular protest. Prime Minister Okuma, who took office in April 1914, was steeped in the prejudices of his era and his class, but he had also been exposed to Western political thought and, in the early years of the Meiji, had been counted as a champion of a British-style constitutional monarchy. Coming out of retirement in 1914 to stabilize the crisis of the new Taisho era, Okuma formed a cabinet that featured a number of eye-catching members, including true heroes of Japanese liberalism such as Ozaki Yukio, the ‘god of Japanese constitutionalism’, who served as his Minister of Justice. His main backing in the Diet came from the party known as the Doshikai. Among the disparate factionalism of Japanese party politics, the Doshikai stood out for their consistent adherence to an economic policy of liberal orthodoxy, the pillars of which were the gold standard and Japan’s intimate relationship with London. This connection was personified by Foreign Minister Kato, who had served as Japan’s ambassador to Britain. After the war, the Doshikai were to morph into the main liberalizing force in Japanese parliamentary politics. In 1925 they were to carry through the introduction of full manhood suffrage.
The fact that these changes occurred without violent overthrow should not lead us to underestimate their significance. When compared to the Chinese Republic’s rough-hewn exercise in democracy, Japan’s elections up to 1919 were staid affairs involving an electorate of no more than 1 million out of a population of 60 million. But from the turn of the century popular interest in politics dramatically revived. Newspaper circulation grew exponentially from 1.63 million copies per day in 1905 to 6.25 million in 1924.21 From the outbreak of war with Russia in 1905, Japan was repeatedly convulsed by waves of popular agitation. For Japanese intellectuals, deeply influenced by European historical thinking, it was evident that Japan as much as China was caught up in a tidal wave of historical change. The question was what implications it should have for foreign policy.
When Okuma and Kato launched Japan into the war they, like the advocates of war in China, did so with a sense of historic purpose that went beyond mere imperial aggrandizement. Invoking Sir Edward Grey and the Anglo-Japanese Treaty to justify the declaration of war allowed Kato to sideline the more conservative figures in the Japanese establishment around genro Yamagata. Looked on in this light, the 21 Points were a further effort by Kato to maintain the respectability of Japanese foreign policy in Western eyes by containing the even more radical, racialized visions of confrontation that were circulating within the imperial military establishment. The gamble backfired horribly. Though Beijing was forced into humiliating concessions, Tokyo could not uphold the hugely controversial Section V demands in the face of international protest. Britain negotiated a compromise between Tokyo and Beijing. Foreign Minister Kato, one of the great hopes of Japanese liberalism, resigned, and from the summer of 1915 until Yuan’s death a year later, Japanese policy towards China lurched towards a new and dangerous adventurism. Rather than pursuing the vain search for international respectability, the rump of the Okuma cabinet allowed itself to be persuaded by Vice Chief of Staff Tanaka Giichi to commit itself to a radical attack on the central authority of Beijing. Japan would eliminate China from the menacing strategic configuration in the Pacific by a ruthless policy of divide and rule, squeezing Yuan to make humiliating concessions, whilst sponsoring nationalists such as Sun Yat-sen to rebel against him. But although by the spring of 1916 Tanaka had managed to push China to the brink of civil war, this did little in a positive sense to secure Japan’s long-term strategic position.
In the summer of 1916 the fiasco of the liberal version of Japanese imperialism opened the door to a new government headed by General Terauchi, a bull-necked militarist and ruthless former governor of Korea. Unlike Okuma, Terauchi was openly hostile to any move toward the liberalization of the Japanese constitution. He took office declaring that his government would ‘transcend’ parliamentary control and no area of policy
was more sensitive than foreign policy. Facing what it believed to be a threat on an oceanic scale from the United States, the Terauchi government was insistent that Japan must go beyond a regional policy of spheres of interest. It was not enough for Japan to carve out its place in Manchuria, alongside British emplacements in Central China and France in the South, let alone to engage in the kind of destructive divide and rule tactics pursued by Tanaka.22 Instead, to confront the threat from across the Pacific, Tokyo must intensify its effort to place all of China under Japanese influence, thereby excluding the Western Powers altogether from the region. But the scandal of the notorious Section V of the 21 Points had taught a lesson. In pursuing this enormously ambitious agenda, Japan must use new tools. The new programme was not without a military dimension. Japan would seek long-term intergovernmental military agreements. But henceforth Japanese policy in China would be directed through the national government in Beijing and the lead would be taken by bankers, principally the shadowy associate of Interior Minister Goto Shinpei, Nishihara Kamezo.23
The enormous centrifugal forces that upended the structures of pre-war finance in the Atlantic were also at work in the Pacific. By 1916, Japan’s balance of payments was so strong and the Entente’s financial position so desperate that Tokyo was in the truly unprecedented position of lending money to the Entente (Table 3). The first loan was for 100 million yen to pay for Russian purchases of Japanese-made rifles on British account. Japan would exert leverage over Beijing by becoming its chief source of foreign finance. And this shift to a strategy of long-term financial hegemony was further reinforced by Japan’s internal politics. Despite their pretensions to ‘transcendence’, Prime Minister Terauchi and his authoritarian friends needed support in parliament.24 To counterbalance the criticism of ousted Foreign Minister Kato and the biting attacks of radical liberals such as Ozaki Yukio, Terauchi’s purportedly independent conservative government was in fact dependent on the gentry party of provincial Japan, the Seiyukai. Their redoubtable leader, Hara Takashi, was no progressive. He resisted the rising tide of democracy in Japan and was only too happy to profit from a rigged election in 1917 to establish a huge majority in the Diet. He scoffed at the aspirations of Chinese nationalism. But of one central feature of the new world Hara was unshakably convinced – the dominant power of the future was the United States. America’s indignant reaction to the 21 Points had made clear that Japan must consider its China policy carefully. Japan must be aware of its limits. China’s sheer bulk counselled caution. As Foreign Minster Motono Ichiro put it in December 1916: ‘There are those who say that we should make China a protectorate or partition it, and there are those who advocate the extreme position that we should use the European war to make China completely our territory . . . but even if we were able to do that temporarily, the (Japanese) Empire lacks real power to hold on to it very long’.25 A Chinese warlord put the same point rather more crudely. For all their aggression, the Japanese were ‘not sure’ that they could ‘swallow’ China. ‘We are weak, we are stupid, we are divided, but we are innumerable, and in the end, if they persist, China will burst the Japanese stomach.’26
III
Such was the delicately poised situation into which Wilson’s appeal to the neutral powers exploded in early February 1917. How would Japan and China react? The American Embassy at least had no doubts about its mission. To consolidate the Chinese Republic and ward off Japan’s influence, Beijing must join Washington in an immediate break with Germany. For five days straight in early February, Ambassador Reinsch and his team belaboured Prime Minister Duan and President Li. As one of his staff put it, Reinsch was at the head of a ‘flying wedge of muscular and determined American citizens who drove China relentlessly over the line of self-sufficiency and into world affairs’.27 It was this aspiration to membership in the international community that resonated through the announcement duly issued by Beijing on 7 February. Faced with Germany’s violation of international law, ‘China for the sake of its status in the world should not remain silent. China will take this opportunity to enter a new era of diplomacy, become an equal member of the international community, and through a firm policy, win favorable treatment from the Allies.’ The British Embassy informed London that the majority of the cabinet and 80 per cent of China’s newspaper-reading public were in favour. From the nationalist South, the Republican newspaper Chung-Yuan Pao declaimed: ‘This is the time for action. We must range ourselves on the side of justice, humanity and of international law . . .’28 But within days of the Chinese break with Germany, these hopes were to suffer a shattering disappointment. Far from embracing the Chinese Republic in its desire to enter the war, President Wilson and Secretary of State Lansing drafted a polite, but discouraging response: ‘The American government highly appreciates disposition of China but does not wish to lead it into danger. It regrets practical inability to give any present assurances . . . The Chinese government, therefore would do well to consult its representatives in the Allied countries. Ignorance of Japan’s attitude also suggests caution.’ To offset the dispiriting impact of this message, Wilson asked Reinsch to express verbally his sincere support for Chinese independence.29 But despite Reinsch’s over-eager promises, and despite the fact that as of April 1917 $3 billion were in the pipeline for the Entente, not even $10 million were approved for China.30
A very different message emerged from Japan. Since 1914 Tokyo had adopted a negative attitude toward China’s participation in the war against Germany. Now, Terauchi’s cabinet was eager to put its new strategy of comprehensive hegemony to the test. On 13 February Nishihara arrived in Beijing with the mission to bring China into the war on Japanese terms. Not to be outdone by Reinsch, the Japanese played on China’s demand for international respect. Nishihara encouraged China to make substantial demands of the Europeans, including a ten-year suspension of the indemnity imposed after the suppression of the Boxer rebellion, permission to establish a viable tax base for the Chinese national government by raising customs tariffs, as well as the right to station units of the Chinese Army in the territory of the foreign Legation for the duration of war. Furthermore, unlike his American rivals, Nishihara had the means to deliver on his promises. Within days of his arrival in China he was in negotiations over large loans. On 28 February 1917 Nishihara received Tokyo’s approval for an initial tranche of 20 million yen ($10 million), to be disbursed immediately on declaration of war against Germany.
As far as Tokyo was concerned, its new strategy in China seemed to be paying handsome dividends. The Americans appeared surprisingly easy to intimidate. Given the perilous state of the war in Europe, the British and French were willing to concede virtually anything Japan demanded.31 In January 1917, in exchange for the despatch of a Japanese flotilla to the eastern Mediterranean to help combat the Austro-German U-boat menace, they secretly approved Japan’s retention of Germany’s rights in Shandong after the end of the war. The real problem for Japan in its search for a policy beyond the imperialism of spheres of interest was, as it turned out, the Chinese. In Tokyo it might seem that the choice was between a policy of divide and rule and one of sponsoring the consolidation of a cooperative Chinese national government. But the awakening of Chinese nationalism confronted Tokyo with a fundamental dilemma. In 1915 Japan’s 21 Points had united China against Japan. The unintended effect of Tokyo’s new policy of working concertedly with the Beijing government was to discredit their Chinese collaborators and to unleash precisely the kind of disintegration that General Tanaka’s secret agents had worked so hard to manufacture through subversive means in 1916. As news leaked out that Prime Minister Duan had accepted Japan’s generous offer of loans, a wave of nationalist opposition began to build. From his rebel base in Southern China, Sun Yat-sen let it be known that he opposed entering the war. Echoing the fears that Prime Minister Duan himself had expressed to the Americans, Sun insisted, that ‘Whether a country can promote her status’ by means of war, depended ‘on the strength she has gained
. For China, to join the allies will result in domestic disorder rather than improvements.’32
The battle for the future of the Chinese Republic began in April 1917, with America’s declaration of war on Germany. Prime Minister Duan responded by convoking a conference of military governors in Beijing, who agreed that China must follow suit. But he was now anxious about the reaction of parliament, which though it had voted to break off relations might not support a declaration of war by a government beholden to Japan. With characteristic tact, his warlord friends decided to surround the parliament with an armed mob of their retainers. Outraged by this blatant act of intimidation, the Guomindang majority agreed that a declaration of war was essential on patriotic grounds, yet declared that China could go to war to defend its honour, only once Duan and his pro-Japanese clique had resigned. When Duan refused, President Li dismissed him. Duan’s military cronies left Beijing announcing that they would raise a rebellion. But Li was in no mood to compromise. The warlords’ challenge to the parliament was illegitimate and would either lead to ‘a partition of the country’ or risked reducing China to a ‘protectorate [of Japan] like Korea’.33 In fact, sticking as best it could to the principles of its new policy, Tokyo exercised considerable restraint, turning down several requests from Duan for aid. Japan wanted to deal with an authoritative government. It was President Li who precipitated the final collapse by summoning to Beijing one of the most reactionary of the warlords, Zhang Xun, who he apparently believed could serve as a counterweight to the two major militarist groupings that had emerged from Yuan Shi-kai’s power bloc: Prime Minister Duan’s Anhui clique and General Feng’s Zhili power base. Zhang, however, had his own ideas. He occupied the imperial palace and proclaimed the restoration of the Ch’ing dynasty. President Li was placed under house arrest from which he had to be rescued by Japan’s embassy guards.
