The Deluge
Page 41
Wilson was desperate not to lose both the Japanese and the Italians from the conference in a single week.26 He did not pay the Japanese population the double-edged compliment he paid the Italians by appealing to them over the heads of their own government. On 22 April the argument shifted decisively in Japan’s favour. The Chinese delegation were told that though they had the sympathy of the Western Powers, they must consider themselves bound by their prior treaty with Japan.27 To moderate the blow, on a suggestion from Britain, a compromise was reached under which Japan publicly stated its desire to inherit only the economic privileges granted to Germany in Shandong and renounced any intention of assuming permanent administrative control of the territory.28 But given the charged emotions on both sides, this was far from enough. Even an apologetic delegation from Wilson could not dissuade the Chinese from issuing a formal protest to the Council of Four, invoking the 14 Points.29
Given the vested interest of the Chinese elite in international recognition at almost any price, the matter might well have rested there, had it not been for the reaction in China itself. Since Japan’s humiliating 21 Points ultimatum in 1915, the cities of China had witnessed wave upon wave of nationalist protest. When the news of Japan’s success over Shandong reached China on 4 May 1919, the anger it unleashed expressed the entire frustration experienced since the revolution.30 Given what had been revealed in Paris about Beijing’s arrangements with Japan, it is no surprise that this was directed inwards as well as outwards. The key slogan of the protests faced both ways: ‘externally, let us struggle for sovereignty; internally throw out the traitors’.31 In the capital the residence of Cao Rulin, China’s Finance Chancellor and the chief conduit for the Nishihara loans from Japan, was burned to the ground. Of the total student population of Beijing at the time, half are believed to have participated in the uprising, including many from the Women’s Teachers’ College.32 Nor was it only young radicals who took up the cause. The warlords and politicians who had been meeting sporadically in the North-South peace conference brokered by Japan immediately called a special session from which they instructed the Paris peace delegation that ‘if the peace conference should . . . refuse to uphold China’s position, we 400 million Chinese people . . . will never recognize it’.33
These unprecedented protests placed the diplomats in Paris in an impossible position. Koo was desperate to secure for China a position as a founding member of the new order. But he could not sign the Versailles Treaty without reservations on Shandong. Wilson and Lloyd George ruled this out. Making an exception for the Chinese risked derailing the entire conference. The Beijing Foreign Ministry was forced to inform the indignant provinces that the balance of interests suggested that China should sign the treaty anyway. Once League of Nations membership was secured, the Chinese assumed that the other nations would vote them into the League’s Council, from where they might seek redress. But the reaction to this proposal was a further round of student demonstrations and strikes. With Beijing under martial law, over one thousand patriotic protestors were detained. By early June, the conservative Chinese President Xu Shichang was scandalized to see a noisy crowd of young women outside his residence demanding the release of their incarcerated male classmates. In solidarity, the merchant community formed a nationwide business association and announced a boycott of Japanese goods.34 In Shanghai protests in foreign-owned textiles plants brought out perhaps as many as 70,000 workers in what was the first overtly political mass strike in Chinese history. Meanwhile, anxious to do their bit for the national cause, Chinese students studying at universities across America besieged Congress and found an unusually receptive audience amongst Republicans who were only too happy to accuse Wilson of going soft on ‘Japanese imperialism’.
On 10 June Prime Minister Qian Nengxun’s cabinet collapsed, and a day later President Xu Shichang tendered his resignation.35 A first round of detainees were released, but the nationalist protests continued unabated. On 24 June the Chinese government resorted to the humiliating expedient of announcing that its ‘strategy’ consisted of allowing the delegation in Paris to make up their own minds. Meanwhile, the most senior member of the delegation had retired to a suburban French sanatorium, leaving the rest of the team besieged in their hotel rooms on the Boulevard Raspail by a picket of enraged students. Independently, on 27 and 28 June first the Beijing government and then the Paris delegation decided that China could not sign the treaty.
III
The Japanese delegation signed the Versailles Treaty and Japan took its place as a member by right of the inner Council of the League of Nations. Its status as a major power was now undisputed. But the price that it had paid was steep. On the nationalist right the dual experience of the rejection of racial equality and the scorn heaped on Japan over its Shandong claim provoked a violent counter-reaction. In early 1919 General Ugaki Kazushige, a subordinate of Tanaka, commented: ‘Britain and America seek, through the League of Nations, to tie down the military power of other nations whilst nibbling away at them through the use of their long suit, capitalism. There doesn’t seem to be much difference between military conquest and capitalist nibbling.’36 Japan must hone its sword to respond in its own way. In October 1921 three young Japanese military attachés met in Baden-Baden, Germany, to discuss the example provided by the European states for Japan. For these future leaders of right-wing Japanese militarism, Ludendorff’s concept of a new era of Total War waged between huge global power blocs was one of the most inspiring concepts produced by World War I. For young Japanese military officers in Germany in the aftermath of the war, including Tojo Hideki, later the much-reviled leader of Japan in World War II, this was a future they envisioned for Japan in a struggle against the Western Powers.37 They would fight at a vast material disadvantage, as Imperial Germany had done. They would compensate on the one hand by establishing an autarchic zone in China and on the other by rallying the army around an extreme samurai ethic, which depicted ‘the way of the warrior (bushido) as the search for death’.38 But this was not the mainstream response, even amongst nationalists who were hostile to the new Western order. Whatever one thought of the hypocrisy of the West, the force at its command demanded respect. Ugaki no less than Prime Minister Hara was convinced that ‘for the forseeable future, the world will be an Anglo-American realm’.39
In China itself the rejection of the Versailles Treaty by Beijing was backed by a truly rare display of national unity. But it begged the question of how, beyond patriotic demonstrations, China was to secure a place for itself in the new international order. Fortunately for China, Beijing had declared war in 1917 not only on Germany but on the Habsburg Empire as well. Away from the high-stakes game being played at Versailles, in the arena of the smaller peace conferences in the Paris suburbs China could develop a more constructive diplomacy. Sticking to the position adopted since May, China insisted that the successor states to the Habsburg Empire forgo the privileges normally claimed by the Western Powers.40 The fulfilment of Chinese wartime and post-war diplomacy came on 10 September 1919 when it signed the Treaty of Saint-Germain with Austria. This treaty, like the Treaty of Versailles, included the League of Nations Covenant in its preamble and gave China full rights of membership. At the first meeting of the League’s General Assembly in December 1920, China, the most populous country on earth, was voted onto the Council by a huge majority.
A year earlier, in December 1919, China had successfully concluded its first international friendship treaty that explicitly provided for equality of status and ruled out extraterritoriality with the Bolivian Republic. By March 1920 China had established diplomatic contacts with the Weimar Republic. In June 1920 Beijing entered into a treaty with Persia on the Bolivian model. The following year, in May 1921, the negotiations with Berlin resulted in a trade treaty that provided for tariff autonomy for both sides. The freedom to set tariffs that was denied to China under the unequal treaties of the nineteenth century was denied to Germany under the Versailles Tr
eaty. To student radicals like Mao Zedong the parallels between China’s situation and that of the Weimar Republic were compelling.41 Both were victims of Western imperialism. And Sun Yat-sen, the nationalist leader and long-time admirer both of Bismarck and Germany’s organized capitalism, took this one step further. In 1923 he sought to lure the Weimar Republic into cooperation with Beijing by suggesting that ‘to get rid of the yoke of Versailles there is no way better than the assistance of establishing a great, strong, modern army in China . . .’. China would be a ‘sort of invisible force in the Far East’ to be ‘called to’ Germany’s aid.42
But it took considerable imagination to see in a Sino-German alliance a true means of escape for either country. What China needed was leverage in the Asian arena. In the chain of foreign oversight that the Western Powers were attempting to orchestrate around China, there was one missing link: Russia. With Russia excluded from the Versailles order and wracked by civil war, might Beijing use negotiations with Moscow to drive a wedge into the system of unequal treaties?
Already in July 1918, as the struggle over Brest-Litovsk was reaching its climax, Commissar Georgy Chicherin had announced that the Soviet regime renounced all claims to extraterritorial privilege in China. A year later the promise was repeated by Deputy People’s Commissar Lev Karakhan. Invoking the language of the Petrograd peace formula of 1917, he promised that the Soviet regime renounced all ‘annexations . . . any subjugation of other nations, and indemnities whatever’.43 As the military fortunes of the Red regime recovered, the Kremlin was to think better of this offer. But for China it set a precedent. In the spring of 1920 a copy of Karakhan’s original expansive statement was widely publicized in translation and caused a sensation. On 27 May 1920, in the so-called Yili Protocol signed between Chinese and Soviet negotiators in the Xianjiang region of the far west, the Soviets conceded to China the two demands that were refused by all the Western Powers: full freedom to set its own tariffs and Chinese jurisdiction over Russians in China. Soon afterwards Beijing unilaterally ended the Boxer indemnity payments to Russia. Next it withdrew recognition from the remnants of the Tsarist embassy in China and on 25 September 1920 Chinese troops took control of the Russian sector of the European concession in the Northern port city of Tianjin and hoisted the Chinese national flag.
At the same time, Beijing asserted control of its northeastern frontier by sending an armed detachment of police to remove the Russian officials from the courthouse in Harbin, from which they had administered justice over the entire area of operation of the Russian-owned Chinese Eastern Railway. The 1,400 miles of railway track that made up the final leg of the Trans-Siberian railway were the true strategic prize in North-East China. The takeover in Harbin was the prelude to a more aggressive assertion of Chinese control. In December, Beijing asserted its ‘supreme control’ over the railway and its management and excluded the Russian management from any ‘political activity’.44 It was a remarkable testament to the shift in the balance of power brought about by the Russian collapse that such demands could even have been contemplated, let alone conceded. Whether China would be able to make them permanent would depend both on the Western Powers, Japan and Russia.
18
The Fiasco of Wilsonianism
In presenting the text of the Versailles Treaty to the Senate on 10 July 1919, Woodrow Wilson chose words of extraordinary drama. ‘The stage is set, the destiny disclosed. It has come about by no plan of our conceiving, but by the hand of God who led us into this way. We cannot turn back. We can only go forward, with lifted eyes and freshened spirit, to follow the vision. It was of this that we drew at our birth. America shall in truth show the way. The light streams upon the path ahead, and nowhere else.’ ‘Shall we or any other free people hesitate to accept this great duty?’ ‘Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?’1 The language was exalted but Wilson was not exaggerating. Both the victors and the vanquished looked to the United States as the pivot of the new order. As Wilson had prepared to leave Paris on 26 June, Lloyd George addressed to him a final despairing letter, imploring him to place the credit of the American government ‘at the disposal of the nations for the regeneration of the world’.2 But it was not only financial reconstruction that hinged on Washington. The Franco-German peace depended on the joint security guarantee of London and Washington. In Asia, Prime Minister Hara of Japan was hinging his foreign policy on Washington, whilst China looked to the League of Nations for redress. So too did the Germans, who had realized that though Wilson had disappointed them, only at the price of a signature could they call into existence the international structures through which the hated Versailles Treaty might be revised.
But by the time he arrived home in the US it was clear that Wilson would face a serious fight in Congress. The divided powers of the American constitution had preoccupied him since his earliest days as a political thinker. What had driven him into politics was a sense that the American nation state had reached a turning point that required creative presidential leadership. Since 1913 Wilson had used the presidency in new ways to drive congressional action and mobilize public opinion. He had established a new apparatus of national economic government, led first and foremost by the Federal Reserve. The war had led to state interference across American life. In 1919 what was put to the test was not only congressional ratification of the treaty but Wilson’s entire political project. The paralysis produced by the stand-off between the White House and the Senate was compounded by a wide-ranging social and economic crisis, more severe than anything America had witnessed since the traumatic years of recession and populist mobilization in the 1890s. What was exposed at this moment of disaster was not only the central role of the United States in world politics, but also the frailty of the American state as the pivot of this new order. American history was no longer a domestic drama. The political and economic crises of post-war America had global ramifications.
I
Wilson’s propagandists painted the ‘Treaty Fight’ as the second round in the great struggle between the President’s idealism and the cynicism of ‘old politics’.3 The first round had been fought in Paris, the second would be contested at home. From the outset, Wilson was at a disadvantage. The concessions he had made to the demands of Japan and the Entente fatally undermined the legitimacy of the Versailles Treaty. Wilson’s friends on the left deserted him in disillusionment. Even the progressives of the New Republic disowned the treaty. During September 1919, Henry Cabot Lodge, the Republican Senate leader, hounded Wilson through the Foreign Affairs Committee. To further his vendetta against the President, Lodge took evidence from every disaffected minority in America. He even took advantage of disillusioned Wilsonians such as the young William Bullitt, who aired in public the embarrassing divisions between Wilson and his Secretary of State, Robert Lansing.4 It was a battle of attrition. Threatened by hypertension, the President put his life on the line. In an attempt to outflank the Senate and reestablish his personal bond with the American people, Wilson embarked on a gruelling nationwide speaking tour in defence of the treaty. In the intense heat of an Indian summer, the President’s itinerary through the western states was cut short on 26 September by the first of a devastating series of strokes. As the treaty reached the crucial vote in the Senate in November, Wilson lay partially paralysed on his sickbed.
For critics of the President this narrative of heroic failure was itself symptomatic of Wilson’s warped perception of reality. In the aftermath of the debacle, Lodge’s star witness Bullitt sought solace on the analytic couch of Sigmund Freud. Together Bullitt and Freud co-authored a compelling psychobiography that analysed the failed President as a man trapped in an imaginary world of language woven by his domineering Presbyterian father.5 To Republicans and Democrats interested in a compromise, the President was mulish. A majority in the Senate were ready to pass the treaty. But a two-thirds vote was needed. There was no doubt an irreconcilable, isolationist minority. But it was not these men who
robbed Wilson of his peace. His truly dangerous opponents were the mainstream leadership of the Republicans, who could not reasonably be described as isolationist. They had favoured a far more aggressive stance in the war than Wilson. Even as he assaulted the Covenant in his rousing speech to the Senate on 12 August 1919, Lodge insisted in tones as strong as ever used by Wilson that the United States was ‘the world’s best hope’.6 Like Teddy Roosevelt, he had at times been willing to consider a trilateral alliance with both Britain and France. In 1919 other prominent Republicans were still active supporters of the League of Nations. A two-thirds majority consisting of mainline internationalist Republicans such as Lodge and moderate Democrats would have been willing to pass the treaty with reservations, above all to Article X of the League Covenant that provided for collective assistance in case of aggression against members of the League. What they demanded was that Congress must have the final word in approving any collective enforcement action. Since the weakly worded Covenant could easily have been interpreted in this direction, it was Wilson himself who presented the ultimate obstacle to compromise. He insisted that the treaty must be accepted whole and complete, or not at all.