by Hew Strachan
The extent of his self-deception, and the reality of Japan’s hold on China, became evident over the course of the following year. The twenty-one demands had further weakened the Kuomintang. Torn between competing interpretations of Chinese nationalism, over 150 revolutionaries had accepted pardons from Yuan and returned from exile. The few that stayed, preeminently Sun Yat-sen, advocated such a level of subordination to Japan that they forfeited political credibility in their homeland and so deprived themselves of any value to their hosts.76 With the revolutionaries weakened, Yuan concluded that the next step to stability and order would be the fulfilment of his ambition to become emperor. He imagined that Japan, satiated by the treaty of 25 May, would support him in this desire: privately his Japanese advisers egged him on, publicly the Japanese government quite properly stated that the constitution of China was China’s own affair. Yuan had also to reckon with the frustration of Japan’s nationalists and of its army, smarting at the outcome of the 1915 negotiations. His apparent diplomatic success had thwarted Japan; an accretion to his power might threaten Japanese interests yet further. He had faced the consistent opposition of the intelligence bureau of the Japanese general staff since 1911. Kato’s fall gave the army an opening in the making of foreign policy. With the prime minister, Okuma Shigenobe, as an interim foreign secretary until October 1915, and then with the appointment of Ishii, who had been ambassador in Paris, the civilians’ grasp of Chinese affairs declined. The army was prepared to support the restoration of the monarchy in China, but the emperor it had in mind was a Manchu puppet.77
In November 1915 Yuan suggested that the Entente powers support his candidature in return for China’s entry to the war. He now recognized that belligerence might be the price of entry to the peace negotiations. China could then press directly for the return of Tsingtao. In June China tried to curry the support of the Entente by offering infantry and arms: the former were to provide labour for the western front and the latter were German-made rifles, many of which had still not been paid for. In London the Foreign Office had been cautious, not least because its Far Eastern policy was predicated on the existing alliance with Japan rather than on a putative arrangement with a weaker power. But within China itself some Britons, including Yuan’s political adviser George Morrison, encouraged the president. The British military attaché was attracted by the offer of men; British business interests saw the opportunity to eliminate German competition in China; and Indian intelligence was fearful of propaganda and subversion emanating from Germany’s embassy in Peking.78
Grey’s solution to Yuan’s initiative was to propose that the Entente approach Japan for its reactions. However, the Japanese had been reading British ciphers and knew perfectly well that the idea of China’s entry to the war was Peking’s, not London’s. It was one which put the danger which Yuan posed for Japan in its starkest terms. China would create an army, ostensibly for the war, in reality to counter Japan; it would do so under the umbrella of Britain, the ally around whom Japan’s foreign policy was constructed. Japan’s path became clear. On 6 December 1915 it blocked China’s entry to the war; by the end of the month its army was covertly sponsoring revolution in Yunnan.
Britain, France, and Russia saw Yuan’s monarchy as a means to stability; Japan said that it could not support the idea while it self-evidently did not command consent in China. Deprived of money and munitions, and geographically isolated, the revolutionary warlords made slow progress at first. In February Yuan postponed his plans for monarchy, and in March abandoned them. But by that stage the military governors of south China had deserted Yuan and the Japanese army had increased its support for his opponents. Warlordism increased the leverage of military advice. The revolutionaries in the south accepted it in the name of republicanism, those in the north in the hope of a Manchu restoration. Once again Japanese policy was caught between competing attractions—the establishment of a separate enclave in Manchuria now or the exercise of indirect control throughout China in the future. The dilemma was resolved on 6 June 1916, when Yuan died just as he was about to flee into exile.
Japan acknowledged his successor as president, Li Yuen-kung, who became the advocate of parliamentary government, the representative of the south and of the revived Kuomintang. Opposed to him was Tuan Chijui, the prime minister and the spokesman of the military governors. To describe Chinese politics from June 1916 in terms of two distinct divisions is to disguise the factionalism and self-interestedness manifest within each. In its weakness each grouping looked outside China for support. China’s discord therefore strengthened Japan’s hand, while Japan itself could protest its respect for Chinese integrity.
Outwardly, Japan moderated its policy towards China. It could afford to do so. The settlement of 25 May 1915 had met its principal diplomatic objectives. By 1916 its tack could be different. Japan was in the midst of an economic boom. Exports, which had totalled 526,581,000 yen in 1912, rose to 1,127,468,000 yen.79 Commerce could therefore consolidate Japan’s holdings and become the agent of expansion without ruffling relations with other powers. The boom was fuelled by the removal of European competition, by the low level of economic commitment to the war, and by a rise in cotton exports. Japan’s sales soared all round the Pacific littoral, to Peru and Chile, to the United States, to Russia, and to Australia. Japanese exports to China grew four times between 1913 and 1916. This increase was not the largest in absolute terms or in rate of growth; more significant was the change in the structure of the relationship. China’s importance as a market declined after 1915, while its attractiveness as a home for Japanese investment increased. Between 1914 and 1919, while wages in Japan itself more than doubled on the back of the wartime boom, those in China remained low; in 1915 legislation limited the length of the working day in Japan, while China’s labour force enjoyed no such protection. Japanese industrialists therefore used their wartime profits to establish production in China. In 1914 Japanese owned 111,936 cotton spindles in China; by 1918 this figure had risen to 240,904, and by 1924 to 1,218,544. As a result, Chinese yarn production doubled in volume between 1913 and 1918. At the same time Chinese raw materials enabled Japan to become a major producer of capital goods. The Hanyehping iron and coal company’s average loss of 1.2 million Mexican dollars a year before 1915 turned in Japanese hands to a profit of 2.8 million. New iron production in Manchuria, rather than becoming the foundation-stone for China’s industrialization, was integrated into Japan’s heavy industry. Cut off from European imports by the war and financed by the boom in cotton exports, Japan’s iron and steel industries thrived. Between 1914 and 1919 the gross value of Japan’s industrial production rose from 1.4 million yen to 6.7 million.80
The possibility of China upsetting the consolidation by Japan of its 1915 gains became increasingly remote. In economic terms China was at least an indirect beneficiary of Japan’s success. But with the war’s conclusion Japan could expect a renaissance of European economic competition in the Far East; Germany, if victorious, might reclaim Tsingtao; Russia would resume its push into Mongolia and Manchuria. Kato’s preferred method of managing this scenario, the maintenance of the Anglo-Japanese alliance, had begun to look less secure over the long term. However late and however weak its response, Britain had not been impressed by group five of the twenty-one demands. During the course of 1916 it came to believe that the flight of Indian revolutionaries to Japan enjoyed the support of that country’s government. The India Office, its anxieties for Russia and the north-west frontier temporarily stilled, worried instead about Japanese penetration into southern China and its implications for the north-east frontier.81 In Japan itself, anti-British feeling enjoyed a currency in the press and among the pan-Asian nationalists. Britain’s policy over group five and over Yuan’s bid to join the war was interpreted as directed against Japan. The army, its conviction in Germany’s military invincibility strengthened by its contacts with British troops at Tsingtao, argued that Britain would lose the war.
In reality the s
trains in the alliance, although more evident than its underlying strengths, were manageable. Japanese policy became more, not less, wedded to the Entente. In January 1915 the Germans made two approaches for a separate peace with Japan—through Paul von Hintze, their minister in Peking, and through Uchida, the Japanese ambassador in Stockholm. The Stockholm talks were renewed in March 1916. The aim of Germany’s policy was relief for its eastern front: the neutralization of Japan would remove one of Russia’s major arms suppliers and reopen Russia’s fears for its Asiatic frontiers. It might even lever Russia out of the war. In the longer run commercial interests suggested that Japan’s need for finance could make Germany a more obvious Far Eastern partner than Russia or Britain. But in 1915 Germany’s approach was ambivalent. The Foreign Office confessed itself ignorant about Japan. The navy was directly affected by, and directly involved in, the negotiations. Hintze was an admiral; the need to keep Tokyo sweet argued that the U–boat campaign should be eased to allow Swedish iron ore to be exported to Japan, despite the fact that it might be transformed into weapons for Russia. Most sensitive of all, the navy was being asked to cede to Japan both Tsingtao and the islands in the north Pacific. The problem was that Germany could only offer Japan areas of which Japan was already in possession. Furthermore, if it did renounce its territory in the Far East, Germany still had no guarantee that it would secure an alliance with Japan. In 1915 Germany was not, in the final analysis, prepared to forfeit a possible foothold in China for a possible treaty with Japan. By 1916 it had steeled itself to such a trade-off. But the tokens with which it was playing had no bargaining value.82
For Japan, the attractions of the German offers were their usefulness in underlining to the Entente powers the continuing value of Japan as an ally despite the elimination of Germany as a Pacific power. Uchida was punctilious in keeping Britain informed. In 1916, while Germany pursued in Stockholm a policy that had specific wartime and post-war objectives, Uchida thought the talks were aimed at the achievement of a general peace.
Russia’s dependence on Japanese good will, even more than Britain’s, was highlighted by the German approaches. In 1914 Russia, together with France, favoured the formation of a quadruple alliance (the three Entente powers plus Japan), but ran foul of the opposition of Kato and of Grey, both reckoning that such an alliance would complicate the settlement of China. However, Japan’s ambassador in St Petersburg, Motono Ichiro, was a strong supporter of the Entente; moreover, the Russians were able to read the signals passing between Stockholm and Tokyo, and so were forcefully reminded of the value of good Russo-Japanese relations. Kato’s fall opened the path for Russia’s persistence to bear fruit. The first step, taken on 19 October 1915, was Japan’s adherence to the Declaration of London—the undertaking originally made on 5 September 1914 that Britain, France, and Russia would not seek a separate peace with Germany. Japan’s motivation in making a move which Kato had resisted was not the conduct of the war but the pursuit of war aims: Ishii thus ensured Japan a seat at the peace conference. Russia’s war needs prompted Sazonov to persist in pursuing closer links. On 3 July 1916 the two countries negotiated an alliance committed to the exclusion of a third party from China. Again, Japan’s regional gain was the most evident outcome. The treaty ensured Russia’s acceptance of Japan’s position in China and constituted provision for the possible collapse of the Anglo-Japanese alliance. But its very existence made the latter contingency less likely as it rendered the Anglo-Japanese alliance the only effective diplomatic check on resurgent Russian ambitions in Asia. While both alliances ran concurrently Japan would be the arbiter of affairs in the Far East.83
The treaty made no mention of China’s independence or of the rights of other states in China. For Peking the virtues of neutrality were being wrung dry. Racked by inflation, its government needed fresh loans to survive. In June 1916 the Entente powers agreed in principle to a new loan consortium, but the close working relationship established before the war between the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank and the Deutsch-Asiastische Bank created problems dissolving the old one. German indebtedness meant that Anglo-German loans could not be wound up without damage to British investors and to the standing of British financial institutions. At the same time, Britain’s policy in China was increasingly in thrall to Japan, and Japan’s aim was now to get China to participate in the war.
In October 1916 General Terauchi Seiki, a former war minister and an old Manchuria hand, formed a new coalition government in Japan, with Motono Ichiro as foreign minister. Motono’s policy was one of moderation; Japan’s industrial investments on the mainland now required stability, not military adventurism and civil war. If China joined the Entente its dependence on Japan would increase. Japan could secure for Peking the funds it needed to ensure its domestic political stability, while at the same time legitimizing a purge of German interests in the Far East. Britain had moaned so often about these, but even more about the threat to India from revolutionaries in China and Japan itself, that it could not admit that it now believed that its fears, in the latter regard in particular, had been exaggerated. Moreover, Britain’s pursuit of Chinese labour throughout 1916 came to fruition in January 1917. The arrangements made to transport its recruits centred on Japanese-occupied Tsingtsao. On 14 January 1917 Motono agreed to accord Britain further naval assistance in exchange for a settlement of the two powers’ colonial ambitions in the Pacific and Britain’s recognition of Japan’s claim to Shantung. Motono’s moderation of Japan’s policy in China and his support for the Entente had found its final pay-off. Essentially, Britain saw concessions to Japan in China as a reasonable return for Japan’s contribution to the war effort and for security in India. For many in China, the only way forward now seemed to be belligerence and an even closer relationship with Japan, in the hope that once it had stability it could then eject its unwelcome partner.84
Japan’s identification of its policy objectives with the Entente, therefore, remained entirely self-serving. Japanese resistance to being drawn into the war outside Asia and the Pacific was obdurate. France and Russia in particular hoped for the dispatch of Japanese ground forces to Europe. Britain, more conscious of its status as an imperial power in Asia than of its need for men, was ambivalent: ‘I confess I am not very much enamoured of the idea that the war shd. be decided by the importation of these Yellow men,’ confided Asquith on 31 December 1914.85 He need not have worried. The Japanese, both in 1914 and thereafter, consistently rebutted the Europeans’ proposals. They needed their army intact for the achievement of their Chinese objectives, and for the latter’s possible defence should European rivalries reopen in the Far East after the war. The army conveniently reckoned that its minimum realistic contribution to the Great War would be 400,000 men, a number so large that it would denude Japan. Privately, Japan’s soldiers may also have been concerned by the growing backwardness of their tactics and technology; having been trained by Germans, they had faith in Germany’s military superiority.
Nonetheless, the military value of Japan’s contribution to the Entente should not be underrated just because it remained limited by Japanese policy objectives. Japan entered the war as Britain’s ally, not as a member of the Entente, and it did so as an Asian empire, not a European one. Therefore it was within the confines of the navy and of the Pacific that it elected to operate, and it is within these confines that its military value should be judged. Its initial assistance to the Royal Navy, which enabled the Chinese trade to resume within three weeks of the war’s outbreak,86 was sustained throughout the war. In 1916 it was extended to the Indian Ocean, and in January 1917—a step for which the Anglo-Japanese secret agreement became a quid pro quo— to the Mediterranean. In 1918 the Japanese flotilla was the most efficient of the Entente naval units in that theatre.87 Russia too derived direct military benefit from its relationship with Japan; in addition to security on its eastern frontier, its arms purchases from Japan totalled 430,000 rifles and 500 heavy guns by the end of the first year of the war. Japan�
��s military contribution can be even better appreciated if stated negatively rather than positively. Without it, the ability of Britain and Russia, both major Asiatic powers, to concentrate on Europe would have been considerably diminished.
