Wilson knew that many of the white nations would never agree to such a proposal and his search for a compromise put him on a collision course with Australia’s increasingly deaf prime minister, William Morris ‘Billy’ Hughes, who saw racial equality as a threat to the sacred White Australia Policy. He violently rejected any compromise. ‘It may be all right,’ he scribbled across the draft of one proposal, ‘but sooner than agree to it I would walk into the Seine – or the Folies Bergeres – with my clothes off.’ Wilson shook his head. ‘What can you do with a man who won’t read and can’t hear?’ The official Australian historian, Ernest Scott, saw Hughes’s role differently. ‘By characteristic methods,’ he wrote, ‘he had gained single handed at least the points that were vital to his country’s existence.’17
The political infighting at Paris became so fractious that at one point Wilson had to step between Lloyd George and Clemenceau to prevent a fist fight. By the time the China question came up for resolution, the Japanese had placed Wilson in an impossible position. They would drop their demand for equality and join his League of Nations, Prince Saionji said, only if they were allowed to retain Shantung and the German islands in Micronesia. The Big Four caved in.
On 4 May word flashed across the world that China had been sold out: Japan would retain her hold on Chinese territory, as well as the German islands in Micronesia. Three thousand student demonstrators stormed through the Legation Quarter of Peking screaming in anger at this rank betrayal by their wartime allies. One of them was a young library assistant at Peking University named Mao Tse-tung.
When police moved the mob on, they attacked the residence of the Chinese minister of communications. The occupants were pelted with eggs and a Japanese visitor was bashed with the legs of an old iron bedstead. Rodney Gilbert, who cover- ed the riots for the North-China Herald, wrote in sardonic vein that whatever their motives the rioters ‘deserve full credit for being the first in China to substitute talk for action’.18
The riots gave birth to the ‘May Fourth’ movement symbolising Young China’s frustration, rage and shame over the unequal treaties. Hostility was so vehement that China never ratified the Versailles Peace Treaty. Paul Reinsch was shocked at the betrayal. ‘Probably nowhere else in the world have expectations of America’s leadership in Paris been raised so high as in China,’ he wrote.
The Chinese trusted America. They trusted the frequent declarations of principle uttered by President Wilson, whose words had reached China in its remotest parts. It sickened and disillusioned me to think how the Chinese people would receive this blow which meant the blasting of their hopes and the destruction of their confidence in the equity of nations.19
Chinese anger reached a new pitch when Thomas Millard exposed the secret treaty arrangements between Britain, France and Japan that had settled the fate of Shantung.
Millard had been forced to sell his interest in the China Press in 1915 over his refusal to back Britain at the outbreak of the war. Its new owner was Edward I. Ezra, a Levantine Jew who had made his fortune in the opium trade like so many of Shanghai’s haute bourgeoisie.20 Millard was covering the peace talks for his own weekly publication, Millard’s Review of the Far East. He revealed that at the very time Paul Reinsch, George Morrison and Bill Donald were attempting to induce China to break with Germany in 1917, the British, French, Russian and Italian governments had secretly entered into agreements with Japan ‘by which China’s rights were traded off’.21
Millard claimed – correctly – that the sellout had been determined some time before the decision was made by the Big Four at Versailles. It would be ‘utter folly to presume that the British and French Governments are not fully informed as to the true character of Japan’s actions and policy in China, or that they have any illusions as to its future import and tendency’. He added that the Anglo-French entente with Japan was ‘conclusive evidence that those powers have decided to accept a Japanese suzerainty over certain [Asian] regions as a fait accompli’.
Billy Hughes’s press liaison officer in Paris was Henry Gullett, a Melbourne journalist who had served as official Australian war correspondent with the British and French armies on the Western Front and later with the AIF in Palestine. He was shocked by ‘the lust of territory’, which defined the peace conference. Gullett saw territorial issues as ‘the sinister and dominating note of the proceedings’ and later wrote a pamphlet, Unguarded Australia, in which he argued that it would be folly for Australia to rely on an untried League of Nations for its defence. ‘We must face the fact that of all nations in the world Australia is at present the most unprotected,’ he wrote.
With its three million square miles of territory and its garrison of five million souls, it is in the eyes of overcrowded Europe and Asia, a wide, rich, undeveloped squattage. Our only effective and permanent safety lies in greater population and this can only be attained by immigration.
We do not necessarily need great standing arsenals. But we do need huge manufacturing plants capable of quick adaptation for war purposes. And we shall not have these plants until we have great local markets, or, in other words, a population many times larger than that which we have now.22
Billy Hughes took the initiative to increase Australia’s market share in China. He appointed 56-year-old Edward S. Little as Australia’s first trade commissioner, based in Shanghai. Little spoke fluent Mandarin and had been in business in China for many years. He was visiting Melbourne on his way to start a new life in New Zealand in January 1921 when he was introduced to Hughes. He was as startled as the prime ministerial advisers when Hughes suddenly offered him a salary of £2000 a year to spearhead Australia’s export drive in the republic.
There was just one problem that the London-born prime minister seems to have overlooked: Little was an Englishman. The lack of consultation enraged Australia’s business community, which had campaigned for years for the right to recommend a suitable candidate for such a post. ‘The appointment of an unknown Englishman with no first-hand knowledge of Aust- ralia was a slap in the face,’ the official history of the Australian Trade Commissioner Service says.23 Perversely, the British also objected to the fact that Australia was seeking her own trade representation, thus superseding the authority of the British Consulate in such matters.
Little, a proud, upstanding former missionary, returned to Shanghai loaded down with a vast array of samples of Australian produce and a one-year contract, with the possibility of a four-year extension. For the next two years, he fought valiantly to do his job while the city’s expatriate Australian businessmen subjected him to what he described as ‘malicious and groundless agitation’, The Age mercilessly attacked him in its columns and the British Consulate refused to recognise him.
The pressure for his dismissal was such that while on an official visit to Manchuria in mid-July 1923 he received a telegram from Melbourne: ‘government have decided on term- ination of your engagement commissioner october 18. nobody will be appointed vacancy. confirmation and instructions for winding up following by first mail.’24 Little hurried back to Shanghai, where he wrote to Austin Chapman, the minister for trade and customs, begging for the chance to return to Australia to state his case in person.
While awaiting a reply, he assisted two Sydney women, Rose Venn Brown and Jean Armstrong, in organising an Australian exhibition for a trade fair to be held at Shanghai Racecourse. For the next two months, Little was left in limbo while Rose Venn Brown, who had come to China in 1920 as agent for a group of Australian manufacturers, and Jean Armstrong, social editor of the Ladies’ Companion magazine, sought support for the trade fair from Australian manufacturers.
Austin Chapman ignored Little’s role in this worthy endeavour but heartily commended the women’s efforts. He said it was hoped the fair would be the largest of its kind ever held in Shanghai.25 At the same time, he denied Little the basic right of a hearing and refused to enter into correspondence with him. The En
glishman had no alternative but to close down his office and dismiss his staff. The office furniture was sold at auction. When the last lot had gone under the hammer, Farmer Whyte, an Australian reporter who was visiting Shanghai from Sydney, asked Little’s typist Mrs Wrench for her opinion. ‘I think it is a very foolish thing and that is the opinion of everybody here,’ she said. ‘As for Mr Little, I can say without any hesitation that he has done a great deal of valuable work for Australia. He put his heart and soul into it.’26
The only reason Little could extract from the tight-lipped Melbourne bureaucrats for his dismissal was a vague comment that his appointment had not achieved its objective. ‘Australian trade profited not one whit by the stupid Trade Commissioner stunt,’ The Age gloated. ‘No Australian businessman ever seriously expected it would.’ It added with calculated malice, ‘It would be a mistake to regard Mr Little with anger. The most obvious reflection is that the position of Trade Commissioner seems to deprive any temporary holder of his sense of humour.’27
However, the Little affair rebounded badly on Australia’s good name in East Asia. In Shanghai and Hong Kong, where he was a respected figure, there was almost universal condemnation of his treatment. The North-China Daily News thought the manner in which he had been ‘thrown to the wolves does not impress one favourably with Dominion politics’.28
Edward Little resumed his interrupted journey to New Zealand but later made frequent trips to China. For the next ten years, he bombarded successive Australian prime ministers with letters and cables seeking justice and compensation. At the time of his death in February 1939 he had been completely unsuccessful in achieving either objective.
Defence had been the paramount issue in Australian politics ever since the Anglo-Japanese military alliance was scrapped at the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–22 to enable Britain to form closer links with the United States. Australia and New Zealand had seen the treaty as a guarantee of stability in the Pacific and, although they welcomed closer ties with America, protested in vain against its abrogation. The blow to Japan’s self-esteem was enormous. In the words of a former Japanese foreign minister, the treaty had been discarded ‘like an old pair of sandals’.
Billy Hughes warned his countrymen about the dangers of an expansionist Japan, which he described as ‘a nation of nearly 70 million people crowded together on the margin of subsistence’. ‘She wants both room for her increasing millions of population and markets for her manufactured goods,’ he said.
And she wants these very badly indeed. America and Australia say to her millions, ‘Ye cannot enter in.’ Japan, then, is faced with the great problem which has bred wars since time began. For when the tribes and nations of the past outgrew the resources of their own territory they moved on and on, hacking their way to the fertile pastures of their neighbours.
In August 1920 Marxist-Leninist students returning from Paris formed the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai. The following year Mao Tse-tung attended the party’s first convention in a deserted girls’ boarding school in Frenchtown as the Moscow-sponsored representative of his home province of Hunan.29 The delegates demanded the establishment of ‘a militant and disciplined Party of the proletariat’ and although they criticised the teachings of Sun Yat-sen as rabidly militarist, it was agreed to support ‘his various practical and progressive actions’, opening the way for collaboration between the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang.30
In London, the British and Soviet governments signed an agreement under which the Russians pledged to ‘refrain from any attempt by military or diplomatic or any other form of action or propaganda to encourage any of the peoples of Asia in any form of hostile action against British interests or the British Empire’. This didn’t stop Lenin sending agents from the Third International of the Communist Party (the Comintern) to China with orders to fight Chinese feudalism and foreign imperialism. ‘In the last analysis,’ he said, ‘the outcome of the struggle will be determined by the fact that Russia, India, China etc., account for the overwhelming majority of the population of the globe . . . so that in this respect there cannot be the slightest doubt what the final outcome of the world struggle will be . . . The complete victory of socialism is fully and absolutely assured.’31
Mao Tse-tung agitated for a break with China’s Confucian past and prophesied that the humiliation in Paris would lead to ‘an anti-feudal and anti-imperialistic culture of the masses’. As a sign of goodwill, the Soviets issued the ‘Karakhan Manifesto’, named after the vice-commissar for foreign affairs, Lev Karakhan, which renounced ‘without any compensation and for ever’ all of Russia’s treaty rights in China that ‘had been predatorily seized from her by the Tsar’s Government and the Russian bourgeoisie’. Suspecting a Russian plot to spread Bolshevism in the republic, Peking declined the offer and the Soviets later wriggled out of it.
Chinese society had rarely been so fractured. The Reverend Burgoyne Chapman, the Australian headmaster of a Christian school in Wuchang, had witnessed the revolution and its aftermath at close quarters. In 1920, he painted the dismal picture of a China steadily growing weaker through famine, flood and civil war. ‘Not only is there no republic, but there is no real national government,’ he said on arriving back in Sydney on leave. ‘There have been various parliaments and assemblies since 1911, but all constituted by purchase of seats or by the nomination of place-hunting factions and interested parties or military cliques.’32
These representatives had proved at least as corrupt, selfish and inefficient as their imperial predecessors. As a result, power had fallen into the hands of two of the Northern tuchuns, or warlords, the Old Marshal Chang Tso-lin and General Wu Pei-fu, one of the most capable commanders of the Chihli Clique. The civil war between North and South was as ferocious as ever and Sun Yat-sen’s plans for a united China seemed an impossible dream.
During the sweltering summer months of 1919, the marriage of Bill and Mary Donald reached breaking point. After what she described as ‘a couple of attempts to leave him’, Mary finally walked out for good. Donald took the break-up of his marriage badly. He was left to explain to his circle of friends that his wife had abandoned him. To be a deserted husband was just one step away from being a cuckold and it is possible he was both.
His colleague Rodney Gilbert claimed in a letter to his friend Grey Martel Hall, manager of the Peking branch of the National City Bank of New York (predecessor of Citibank), to know the intimate details behind the break-up. He insisted that fault was to be found on both sides, and that the possession of a fiery temper by husband and wife exacerbated their problems. Hall himself described Mary Donald as a rather ‘frigid’ woman, although many years later Donald suggested to his Chinese secretary Ansie Lee that the real reason for the separation was Mary’s infidelity.1
Mary herself blamed ‘the women who spoiled D by their adoration’. It seems the temptations of life in Peking were just too great and the opportunities for extramarital liaisons just too many for the union to survive.
Mary returned to Shanghai with Muriel and then moved to Hong Kong, where she had made several friends, including Noel Croucher, founder of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and one of the colony’s wealthiest men.2 According to Mary in a letter to Croucher, Donald ‘made a fuss to his lady friends saying I had robbed him of his child so I sent her back with a white nurse knowing full well he would not keep her very long; in three weeks she was back – said he couldn’t stand her fussing for her mother’.3
Mary took Muriel to England and Australia and then, on 27 June 1927, just one week after the death of her father, the builder Robert Wall, they sailed from Sydney in the SS Ventura for the United States. Donald never divorced his wife, nor did he forgive her. He continued to live in their house in Tsung Pu Hutung, although he made no effort to buy out her share.
At 44, he was ruggedly handsome and could have had his pick of the single women at diplomatic soirees in the Legation Quar
ter but he detested such frivolities. Instead, his social life revolved around his American friends Roy Anderson and Rodney Gilbert and a random group of people who would meet at his home for drinks. According to one anonymous guest, Donald’s house was ‘perhaps the most sumptuous home in Peking’. It was furnished with Chinese antiques and among the knick-knacks were historical paraphernalia for smoking opium. For his guests, there were French wines, Scotch whisky and Cuban cigars – ‘astounding for a man who himself never took a puff or a drop’.4 Donald also had an extensive collection of classical records and during his parties Caruso’s rendition of ‘O Sole Mio’ would soar over the Peking rooftops.
One of Donald’s party guests in 1919 was Harry F. Payne, head of the American Bank Note Company, which engraved China’s national currency and postage stamps. To the accompaniment of castanets and soaring strings, Payne started flirting with Eleanora Cox, an employee of the United States Secret Service who was visiting the capital from Shanghai. According to Eleanora, he ‘made ardent love from the very beginning’.5
Eleanora’s job included handling the confidential correspondence of American officers working for the United States Army and Navy departments. She also had dealings with the British and Danish consulates at Shanghai. Over the next few days, Payne bombarded her with dozens of love letters. When she acquiesced to the desires of her hot-blooded suitor, he promised to give her some shares in his banknote company but neglected to tell her that he had a wife and daughter in Chicago. The relationship broke up after she discovered this fact and she successfully sued him in the United States Supreme Court for ownership of the shares. Such were the perils of taking strong drink and listening to Italian love songs chez Donald.
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